What makes a life remarkable?
It’s a question someone asked me at my first book launch event and has stuck with me since. It’s a question that, in many ways, my book Sovereign tries to answer. But how do you answer that in a sentence?
I guess you’d start with the word itself. A remarkable life is a life worthy of remark. But something can only be noteworthy if it’s uncommon. An egg is an egg is an egg. Until one is larger than the others, or speckled, or oddly coloured, or contains two yolks. Then you have a remarkable egg.
And this reveals our central conflict:
A remarkable life, at its core, requires being different in some way. Either by birth, or by choice.
Convention tells you the former is correct: that remarkable people are geniuses, savants, prodigies, and the incredibly lucky.
I’d tell you it’s the latter instead: that remarkable lives are claimed and built, and emerge from a million incremental actions that on their own might seem nondescript, but altogether, are extraordinary.There’s a funny balance when everyone might like to be special or remarkable in some way, but people rarely enjoy standing out.
Why chase the dark path? The road of danger? Why walk alone when there is safety in numbers? Why take on risk when you have so much to lose?
The easiest way to live a life is to do so on autopilot. To follow the rules, and play it safe. To optimise for comfort and safety. And there’s actually nothing wrong with that. It’s just hard to achieve a different outcome if you’re doing what everyone else does.
The problem is that even when you try to play safe by following the rules, the rules will sometimes work against you.
Rules aren’t static. They seem fair, neutral, immovable, but they actually have power. Rules exist to perpetuate themselves and maintain the systems they serve. And those systems aren’t always aligned with your interests.
Breaking the script
The life scripts we follow on the default path work the same way. As a result, being remarkable requires being unique enough in your ambition that you can become unique in your outcomes – or at least in your pursuit of your goals.
Bessie Coleman’s life had a very clear, pre-written script: born the tenth of thirteen children to sharecroppers, she was expected to pick cotton and clean houses. But her brothers returning home from war gave her a very different story of what life could hold.
She decided she wanted to fly and pursued that goal to extraordinary ends, eventually leaving behind everything she knew and loved and travelled to France, where U.S. segregation couldn’t stop her (far more on this in the book).
Mary Somerville was forbidden from learning mathematics by her parents, who believed it was bad for a woman’s health and character. So she borrowed an Euclid textbook and taught herself by candlelight.
What makes these stories remarkable isn’t just the outcomes, but the refusal to accept the default path. People who build remarkable lives don’t always start with remarkable resources. They start with a different relationship to the rules.Coleman only got that international pilot’s licence because she couldn’t go to flight school in the US. Somerville eventually translated Laplace’s physics from French, and her book was being taught at Cambridge University a century before Cambridge University even admitted women to study there.
It’s easy to look, from a distance, and say: "Oh, they were just naturally remarkable," and in doing so take for granted the specific drive, agency and fortitude that made those outcomes possible.
The hard part
Even the naturally talented must fight to be remarkable. Beethoven was incredibly talented, and life mercilessly stripped that talent away from him.
It’s so easy to paint the picture of Beethoven the wunderkind. The prodigious talent. And in doing so, miss the point entirely.
The real story is hardship.
Despite his talent, Beethoven began to lose his hearing at the height of his career. The thing he was born to do, he could no longer do, and his life was crumbling simultaneously.
He could no longer perform, the love of his life was out of his grasp, he felt ill-fated to never marry, he was mired in a legal battle for his nephew Karl, who he saw as a son but was deemed to not be capable of caring for. He had lost it all. But in that terrible darkness, he found his pen again. In 1817 he began the ‘final stage’ of his career. — David Elikwu, Sovereign
Beethoven’s most iconic works are only so iconic because he had gone completely deaf and composed them by feeling the vibrations through his piano. That is the remarkable part. That even with life at its most bleak, when he could have justifiably thrown his hands up and retired, he returned and found a new way to make music.
We cannot control the life we’re born into. The talent we have. The rules society will set. But we have complete control over our response. And it’s in that response that remarkability lives.
