Maybe Average Is Enough

I used to be afraid of being average.

Not failing.

Not collapsing.

Just being ordinary.

The kind of person who does not stand out, dominate, or become exceptional in any obvious way.

For a long time, that felt like a quiet kind of failure.

I did not say it that way back then. I probably would not have known how. But looking back, I think that fear shaped more of my life than I wanted to admit.

I was afraid of becoming forgettable.

Someone who passed through rooms without leaving much behind.

Someone who tried a few things, did some of them poorly, did some of them well enough, then quietly disappeared into a normal life.

The funny thing is, when I look back at my childhood, maybe I was already that person.

Not in a tragic way.

Just in a very ordinary way.

At school, there was this thing we had to do in physical education.

Shuttlecock kicking.

Đá cầu.

Most kids could do it casually. They stood in small groups, kicked it back and forth, laughed, missed, tried again, and got better without making a story out of it.

I was terrible at it.

Not charmingly bad.

Just bad.

During a PE exam, I almost failed because of it. I still remember standing there, trying to keep the shuttlecock in the air, knowing that this simple thing everyone else seemed able to do was somehow difficult for me.

It was not a life-defining tragedy.

It was just embarrassing.

The kind of small embarrassment that disappears from the official record but stays somewhere in the body.

I was not athletic.

I was not socially magnetic.

I was not the kid everyone remembered.

Around that time, Võ Lâm Truyền Kỳ was popular too.

I played it for a few years before high school, but even there, I was not especially good. I remember only fragments now: a few images, a few names, the feeling of being inside a crowded digital world where everyone else seemed to know what they were doing.

I was not the strongest character.

Not the richest player.

Not the person people gathered around.

I was just there.

A ghost in the crowd.

And then, somehow, I got into medical school.

Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine.

I was the only student from my high school who got into medical school that year.

That should have felt like proof.

Maybe for a while, it did.

It looked like the kind of achievement that could correct the old story. The kid who was bad at đá cầu. The kid who disappeared into Võ Lâm Truyền Kỳ. The ghost in the crowd.

Suddenly there was a new sentence attached to him:

He got into medical school.

That sounds like a main-character moment.

But life is very good at ruining main-character moments.

I did not do well in medical school.

In the second year, I failed.

I had to repeat it because my performance was poor.

There is no elegant way to write that sentence.

It is just what happened.

I continued into the third year, but only halfway. By then, something had already broken.

Maybe it was motivation.

Maybe it was fit.

Maybe it was the quiet realization that I was forcing myself through a life that no longer felt like mine.

Eventually, I dropped out.

I can dress that up with context. I can explain that the path was not right, that things changed, that life moved in another direction.

All of that may be true.

But the simple version remains:

I failed the second year.

I repeated it.

I reached halfway through the third year.

Then I left.

After that, I moved to Singapore for my bachelor’s degree.

A new country.

A new school.

A new version of myself, or at least I hoped so.

But changing countries did not transform me into a genius. Life did not suddenly become cinematic. I studied. I adjusted. I survived. I did some things well and some things badly.

I kept going.

Later, I went to Ireland for my master’s degree.

That sounds impressive from far away.

A master’s degree in Ireland.

A clean line on a CV.

The kind of detail that looks better from the outside than it feels when you are living inside it.

I finished before COVID.

Then I could not find a job in Ireland.

I came back to Vietnam on 1 November 2019.

I remember the date because it felt like a line being drawn under a chapter I had expected to continue.

Things did not become easy after I came home.

I could not find a job immediately in Vietnam either.

That was humbling.

Not the polished kind of humbling people describe after success is already secure.

Just plain humbling.

The kind where you have a degree, a story, a few hopes, maybe even a little pride, and the world looks at all of it and says nothing.

No music.

No montage.

No dramatic comeback.

Just silence.

Applications.

Waiting.

And the realization that life does not care how the story is supposed to feel.

Life will make you humble in every possible way.

It keeps reminding you that you are not the main character in a movie.

Not the chosen one in an anime.

Not the person the universe is secretly preparing for a dramatic arc.

Just a person.

One ordinary person among many.

Trying to make something work.

In 2022, I tried to return to academia.

This time in Korea.

Maybe part of me wanted the academic door to remain open.

Maybe I wanted the story to become neat again.

Medical school did not work.

Singapore worked enough.

Ireland worked academically but not professionally.

Vietnam was difficult.

Maybe Korea would make the line straight again.

But life did not become straight.

After about a year, I left.

I returned to Vietnam on 30 April 2023.

Reunification Day.

The official language is about liberation and independence.

The timing was almost funny.

Maybe I had liberated myself from academia too.

There was another reason I came home.

My mom’s health was declining.

She got better later. She is fine now.

But at the time, it changed the weight of everything.

Suddenly the question was not only career.

Not only academia.

Not only whether I could still build an impressive path.

There was family.

There was distance.

There was worry.

There was the quiet realization that no plan survives contact with real life for very long.

So I left.

Again.

Another unfinished thing.

Another turn.

Another line on the CV that says one thing, while the life behind it says something else.

For a long time, I hated that unevenness.

I hated how my life refused to become a clean story.

Medical school, then failing, repeating a year, and dropping out.

Singapore, then a bachelor’s degree.

Ireland, then no job.

Vietnam, then uncertainty.

Korea, then leaving academia again.

Every time I thought the plot was beginning to make sense, life reminded me that there was no plot.

Just decisions.

Constraints.

Family.

Health.

Money.

Timing.

Luck.

Fear.

Duty.

And the next thing that had to be done.

My life may sound unusual when reduced to countries, schools, and degrees.

Living it rarely felt exceptional.

Most of the time, it felt like uncertainty, adjustment, and doing whatever came next.

For years, the word average sounded like a verdict.

It sounded like being placed in the middle of a crowd and told:

This is where you belong.

Not bad enough to be dramatic.

Not good enough to be special.

Just there.

I think many people quietly fear that.

Not total failure.

Not disaster.

But a life that never becomes remarkable.

A life with no applause.

A life where you work, pay bills, learn a few things, lose a few things, get older, and no one writes a story about it.

Growing up, I absorbed the idea that everyone had to be special somehow.

Everyone had potential.

Everyone had some hidden thing inside them waiting to expand.

Standing still meant falling behind.

Ordinary meant wasted potential.

So I kept trying to reinvent myself.

New skills.

New directions.

New ambitions.

New identities.

As if the self needed constant software updates.

As if staying the same for too long meant something had gone wrong.

But over time, I have started to suspect that the real problem was never average itself.

It was the world I was measuring myself against.

We live in an age of exposure.

We do not compare ourselves only to the people in the same room anymore. We compare ourselves to the most visible people on the planet.

Founders.

Athletes.

Traders.

Creators.

Prodigies.

Polymaths.

People already filtered by luck, timing, talent, money, beauty, algorithms, and survival.

The brain does not always understand statistical rarity.

It sees something often enough and assumes it is normal.

Extraordinary becomes the baseline.

Ordinary begins to feel like failure.

That is a dangerous trick.

Most people are ordinary most of the time.

Even exceptional people are ordinary in many areas.

The athlete may be bad at relationships.

The founder may be bad at rest.

The genius may be bad at living.

The person you admire may be impressive only from the angle you are allowed to see.

The internet compresses people into highlights.

It removes boredom.

It removes repetition.

It removes the years when nothing obvious happened.

It removes quiet failures, awkward years, abandoned paths, ordinary days, and private doubt.

Then it shows you the outcome.

And asks why you are not there yet.

No wonder average feels unbearable.

We are drowning in examples of extreme outcomes.

We are also drowning in information.

Books.

Podcasts.

Frameworks.

Courses.

Advice.

Playbooks.

Maps for becoming better.

Reading more is celebrated. Learning more is praised. Knowing more feels like progress.

But there is a difference between consuming ideas and being shaped by them.

Reading fifty books once may expand your vocabulary.

Reading five books twenty times may reshape how you think.

The modern world rewards exposure.

Depth requires repetition.

And repetition looks average.

Sitting with the same problem for years looks average.

Maintaining the same system reliably looks average.

Refining the same craft quietly looks average.

Doing the boring thing again looks average.

But refinement is where mastery lives.

I did not understand that when I was younger.

I thought special meant visible.

I thought improvement had to look dramatic.

I thought a meaningful life had to announce itself.

But some of the most important things in the world do not announce themselves.

They work.

Quietly.

Repeatedly.

Without asking to be admired.

A cron job running every day is not impressive until it stops.

A backup system is boring until the main system fails.

A train arriving on time is unremarkable until it does not.

A person who shows up consistently is easy to overlook until they are gone.

Reliability is rarely glamorous.

But reliability is civilization.

That sentence sounds too large, but I think it is true.

We publicly worship novelty.

Privately, we depend on stability.

We celebrate disruption, reinvention, breakthroughs, speed, genius, and scale.

But the systems we trust most are the ones that behave predictably.

Planes that land safely.

Power that stays on.

Water that runs.

Servers that do not fail.

People who keep doing their part even when nobody is watching.

The people maintaining those systems often look average.

Without them, nothing works.

There is a strange invisibility to useful work.

When something functions well enough, people stop noticing it.

When a system is maintained properly, there is no drama.

When a person is reliable, they become part of the background.

That can feel unfair.

Maybe it is unfair.

But perhaps it is also one of the quiet forms of meaning.

Not all meaning comes from applause.

Some meaning comes from being part of why things keep working.

I think about that more as I get older.

Maybe because I am tired of constant reinvention.

Maybe because I have reinvented myself enough to know that reinvention does not cure the deeper fear.

You can get into medical school.

You can drop out.

You can change countries.

You can change majors.

You can collect degrees.

You can return home.

You can try academia again.

You can leave again because family suddenly matters more than the path you were building.

And still carry the same question underneath everything:

What if I am still average?

What if this is all I am?

I still hear that question sometimes.

Usually not during a crisis.

More often on an ordinary day.

When I see someone younger doing better.

When I read about someone who found their path early.

When I look at my life and see how many detours there were.

For a long time, I treated those memories as evidence against myself.

Proof that I was behind.

Proof that I was not special enough.

Proof that I had missed some train other people managed to catch.

I am not sure I see them that way anymore.

Maybe they were not evidence of failure.

Maybe they were just life.

Unpolished.

Uneven.

A little embarrassing.

A little funny.

Mostly ordinary.

The kind of ordinary that does not become a story until much later.

There is another layer to the fear of being average.

Often, it is not really about being average.

It is about being unseen.

About living a life that draws no applause.

About building something no one celebrates.

About doing work that functions so well it becomes invisible.

About being present but not impressive.

We say we want to be exceptional.

But often what we really want is to be noticed.

There is nothing wrong with that.

It is human.

A child who almost fails đá cầu wants someone to see that he is trying.

A student who drops out wants the story not to end there.

A person moving to another country wants the move to mean something.

A graduate returning home without a job wants the degree to still count.

A son leaving a path because his mother is unwell wants that decision to make sense too.

A worker doing quiet work wants someone to know it took effort.

Wanting recognition does not make us shallow.

But needing recognition in order for life to have meaning may make life harder than it has to be.

Because so much of life will not be recognized.

Most effort disappears.

Most discipline is invisible.

Most growth is boring from the outside.

Most people will never know what you overcame to appear ordinary.

They will see you functioning and assume it was easy.

They will see you standing there and not know how many versions of yourself had to fail quietly for that version to exist.

Maybe maturity is accepting that some of the most important parts of your life will never be fully legible to others.

Maybe depth does not require spectacle.

Maybe a life can be profound without being loud.

I used to think average meant settling.

Now I am beginning to think it can mean something else.

It can mean stable.

Grounded.

No longer performing a constant emergency.

It can mean staying somewhere long enough for depth to form.

It can mean building a life that does not need to impress strangers to be real.

That does not mean ambition is bad.

I still want to improve.

I still want to learn.

I still want to build things.

I still want a better life.

But I do not want improvement to come from panic all the time.

I do not want every skill to become a rescue mission.

I do not want every plan to serve as proof that I am not mediocre.

There is a difference between growing and running away from yourself.

I think I spent many years confusing the two.

Maybe average is not the enemy.

Maybe the enemy is never being able to stay.

Never staying with a craft long enough.

Never staying with a place long enough.

Never staying with a book long enough.

Never staying with a version of yourself long enough to see what it can become.

Always pivoting.

Always upgrading.

Always escaping the shame of being seen as ordinary.

What looks average from the outside is often depth in progress.

A farmer planting the same field each season is not exciting.

Food appears because of it.

A sysadmin checking logs and backups is not glamorous.

Systems survive because of it.

A person showing up every day for work, family, study, health, or a small private promise is not impressive in a viral way.

But a life is made from that.

Not from one grand transformation.

From repetition.

From repair.

From trying again.

From doing the next ordinary thing.

Maybe that is enough.

Not because average is secretly exceptional.

Maybe it is not.

Maybe average is just average.

Maybe ordinary is just ordinary.

But an ordinary life can still be honest.

It can still be useful.

It can still be warm.

It can still hold a few people.

It can still build something slowly.

It can still become real.

I do not need to turn every awkward memory into a success story.

I do not need to pretend the shuttlecock exam taught me greatness.

I do not need to pretend Võ Lâm Truyền Kỳ shaped my destiny.

I do not need to turn medical school into proof that I was chosen.

I do not need to hide that I failed.

I do not need to turn dropping out into a cinematic comeback.

I do not need to make Ireland heroic.

I do not need to pretend returning to Vietnam without a job was secretly glamorous.

I do not need to turn Korea into another unfinished failure.

Some things are simply what happened.

Some things are embarrassing.

Some things are humbling.

Some things are unfinished.

And still, somehow, life continues.

That may be the most ordinary thing of all.

And maybe the most comforting.

If I show up.

If I go deep instead of wide.

If I refine instead of constantly reinvent.

If I build something slowly and keep building it.

If I let some work remain invisible.

If I let some effort go unpraised.

If I stop treating average as a sentence.

Maybe I can finally live without needing every part of my life to become proof.

Maybe that does not make it exceptional.

Maybe it makes it real.

And maybe real is enough.