Familiar yet stunning

My eight-year-old daughter is into birdwatching. This means I now find myself into birdwatching too. I know very little about birds and can identify only the most common, but this hasn’t stopped us from enjoying the hobby.

One of her favorite birds is the Blue Jay. I suspect this is because of their prevalence (she can see one everyday if we look long enough) and because they stand out amidst the many brown birds that look exactly alike (to our novice eyes).

To any serious birder the Blue Jay is nothing to get excited about. They are extremely common in nearly every US state and much of Canada. Some people even consider them pests. I have a childhood memory of my mother telling me, “I don’t care for the Blue Jay, he's a bully".

Recently my daughter spotted one perched on our patio furniture so she ran to get our National Geographic bird guide. “We don’t need that,” I said. “It’s just another old Blue Jay.”

She persisted as only an eight-year-old can, and was soon reading aloud the page on the North American Blue Jay.

I was struck by the guide's succinct description: familiar yet stunning.

At first those two adjectives seem like an odd fit, but the more you think about it, the more sense it makes. Blue Jays might be everywhere, but they are stunning.

So many things in life are like this.

We can sit in a chair and be transported from New York to Los Angeles in 5 hours, but rather than marvel at air travel, we gripe about it. The magic of compound interest—once called “the eighth wonder of the world” by Albert Einstein—is misunderstood and ignored by most. The employee that shows up every day and quietly does great work is overlooked, while the content creator on LinkedIn goes viral with yet another inane take that adds nothing of value to society.

Common thinking says that success comes to those that stand out from the crowd. Some take that to the extreme, doing anything and everything to be seen and heard as they conflate recognition with success.

Most of the time it's better to keep doing what you're doing—remembering that familiar and stunning are not mutually exclusive.

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