Your Life is Entirely Extraordinary

"Memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life." - Milan Kundera, Ignorance.

Ironically, of all Milan Kundera’s works I remember only a couple of fragments – of which this is one.

Predictably, I discovered that I didn’t even remember it accurately. What I remember is this: ‘You think you remember everything, but at the end of your life you have only a few snapshots’.

This is why I am downhearted when I ask my daughter ‘how was school?’ and she says ‘boring’ – because 'boring' means is there is nothing from that day that she will remember in later life, indeed probably nothing that will make it to the end of the week.

And yet, this is how many of us choose to live our lives: in routines which change very little from one day to the next. And the horror of this is that all those episodes of your life can be – at best – collapsed into a single snapshot: how it felt to sit at that desk, in that building.

When we look back on our lives it is comprised almost entirely of the extraordinary; everything else is wiped away.

The affective context model explains why; and I believe that understanding memory may help us to live better lives:

The theory proposes that we encode our experience in the form of subtle emotional reactions, and we use these to reconstruct those experiences. It predicts that our recollections will never be entirely accurate therefore, and that those things most likely to persist will be the extraordinary – those events that had a big impact on us.

These need not be a skydive or the birth of one’s first child – they can be a single comment, a piece of feedback that influenced us profoundly, or an act of unexpected kindness. This is why humans are essentially storytellers – because a story is an account of something extraordinary, a way of sharing our reactions. We don’t tell stories about an uneventful clothes wash cycle. Not unless the machine flooded the kitchen.

And now we come to you: would you live your life differently if you knew that all the non-extraordinary bits are simply erased? That everything ‘routine’ is lost?

More importantly: are you extra-ordinary for other people? In what way do you enter into other people’s stories? When they look back at the scattered fragments that make up their lives, will you be among those fragments?

As organisations do we create opportunities for the extraordinary at work, and do we celebrate it when our colleagues are extraordinary?

This question matters to us both as individuals and as learning professionals: an important part of our job is precisely this: to craft the extraordinary. We endeavor to take people away from the routine and, in a few short hours, to design an experience that will become a part of who they are, and a story that they will tell.

Your life really is entirely extraordinary.