Frankly, being extraordinary -- in the dictionary sense of being exceptionally special and remarkable, let's say being in the top 1% -- is something of a young person's conceit.
We all dream of making it to the top at one point or another. Nearly everyone fails to get there.
Early in life other people will indulge your fixation on this because you're young, but most of them aren't extraordinary either, so as you age, their patience with it grows thin. If you cling to a fixation on being extraordinary it will ultimately isolate you and tear you apart psychologically.
Fortunately there is an alternative which some discover as time passes. It is infinitely more powerful and useful than worrying about whether you're extraordinary or not, and will propel you to heights you never realized you could achieve.
The alternative is to compare yourself today only to who you were yesterday, and focus on always pursuing new personal bests.
By putting in the time and staying focused you can become uncannily good at almost anything this way. Far better than most people, and grinding out one little win at a time is surprisingly satisfying.
Will it make you the best? I don't know. This tactic is surely some part of how the best got to where they are. I doubt I am the best at anything but I have not bothered to check. In the end it doesn't really matter, you are able to become great and be happy, and that is more than enough.
I think this is kind of the point OP was making. You mention being in the top 1%—so now we have a definition of 'extraordinary'.
Now look at your life through every facet. Are you really not in the top 1% of anything? 1% is not even that high a bar. You don't even have to be the best on your block to be in the top 1%. Or even tenth best on your block.[0]
It could be anything that you're extraordinary at remember. Even if you want to limit it to creative pursuits, there are so many different musical instruments, art forms, styles of writing, types of dance, that with a bit of effort and specialisation, becoming 'extraordinary' is not that difficult, even before you start 'multiplying' skills (the best writer on running, the best ballroom dancing photographer, etc).
> Now look at your life through every facet. Are you really not in the top 1% of anything? 1% is not even that high a bar.
While I haven't yet framed it this way using your language, I'll share the belief that complexity science thinking is slow-brewing within me:
That the very network structure of our social fabric (as it has evolved) is selected to be just so, such that we have the maximum chance to each be extraordinary, given the existing meme pool. Small world networks are a goldilocks zone of clustering and nearness of any two nodes. The subjective experience of this small-world feature is that the average path length between any two random points is "surprisingly close". The math is such that any two people, aka any two ideas, aka any problem and its corresponding best solution -- that all these things are on average as close together as the math allows (while still preserving high clustering), by virtue of the small-world networks properties of the social graph.
The universe wants you to remix ideas, wants your mind to be a recombinator of the most diverse ideas, wants you to be a memetic vessel containing the most extraordinary set of ideas the universe can offer you. Because that's good for the collective endeavour of humanity :)
I'm really not in the top 1% of anything, when comparing to the set of people who care about it. I'm mediocre. I think the point of the article is that part of growing up, for 99% of people, is realizing that. And realizing that you can still build a good life.
There's a significant difference between 'the top 1% of people' to 'the top 1% of people who care about a specific thing'.
The reason this is so significant is because now, your extraordinariness depends not just on you, but the thing.
If you're a drummer, for example, there are about 1 million drummers in the US. To be in the top 1% of drummers, you need to be one of the best 10 000 drummers in the US. One of the best 200 in the state. There are about 20 000 places incorporated in the US, meaning you need to be the best drummer in both your town and the next to be in the top 1% in the US.[0]
Compare that to go players.
There are around regular 50 000 Go players in the US. To be in the top 1%, you need to be in the top 500. Top 10 in your state. Best in your town and the next 39.[1]
But crucially, if you learn how to play go, and you practice, you only have to play better than 49500 players. If you learn how to drum, you have to play better than 990 000 people. And if you want to be an extraordinary guitarist, well, god help you.
Wanna be an extraordinary Tanana[3] speaker in the world? You can be the best if you can beat just 29 other people. Probably wouldn't take much study to be the best Tanana poet.
Examples are contrived and I've massacred the maths, but being extraordinary is not hard in an extraordinary field. It is hard to be extraordinary in a very ordinary field.
I agree though, coming to terms with whether you want to be extraordinary, and if so, whether you want to be extraordinary in a very ordinary field, is a part of growing up.
Getting to the top 1% isn't really hard. There are 8 billion people on the Earth getting to the top one percent means being in the top 80 million. I can think several things that I'm in the top 1% because most of the people newer do it.
The problem with the internet your reach is higher and you can see people who are one in the million or billion in one aspect of their life, but don't see anything else.
We all dream of making it to the top at one point or another. Nearly everyone fails to get there.
Early in life other people will indulge your fixation on this because you're young, but most of them aren't extraordinary either, so as you age, their patience with it grows thin. If you cling to a fixation on being extraordinary it will ultimately isolate you and tear you apart psychologically.
Fortunately there is an alternative which some discover as time passes. It is infinitely more powerful and useful than worrying about whether you're extraordinary or not, and will propel you to heights you never realized you could achieve.
The alternative is to compare yourself today only to who you were yesterday, and focus on always pursuing new personal bests.
By putting in the time and staying focused you can become uncannily good at almost anything this way. Far better than most people, and grinding out one little win at a time is surprisingly satisfying.
Will it make you the best? I don't know. This tactic is surely some part of how the best got to where they are. I doubt I am the best at anything but I have not bothered to check. In the end it doesn't really matter, you are able to become great and be happy, and that is more than enough.