Everyone quotes the first half of Theodore Roosevelt's line about success. The genius, the rare kind, the man who can do what no one else can do. It's the memorable half. The second half is the one that has been working on me recently:
"He is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellow, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree."
Developed. That's a process word. Roosevelt isn't handing out a compliment, rather he's describing a mechanism. Something ordinary went in, and something more than ordinary came out, and in between there was development. So what is it? What actually happens in there? I ask because I have been trying to develop some ordinary qualities for about forty years, and my results do not look like what I expected.
The line Roosevelt implies
Read that sentence quickly and you hear steady application. A man picks up an ordinary quality like diligence, patience, or courage and applies himself to it consistently, and it grows. Upward and to the right. The way a savings account grows. That's how we talk about spiritual growth too. Open any book on it and you'll find some version of the diagram which is a line climbing steadily. The message is clear enough that if you're doing this right, you should see consistent, measurable progress.
I have never once experienced it that way.
I have the same argument with my wife that I had five years ago. I fall into patterns I was certain I had buried. Some seasons I'm eager to open Scripture and other seasons it feels like a chore I'm behind on. There are stretches where I can feel myself growing and stretches where I would swear I'm going backward. If development is a straight line, I am failing at it badly and have been for decades.
What if Roosevelt was describing the outcome and guessing at the process?
I think that's exactly what happened. He looked at men who had clearly developed ordinary qualities to an extraordinary degree, and from the outside their lives looked like steady accumulation. So he described it that way. But he wasn't inside it since no one is inside anyone else's development.
From a distance, a ship's course looks like a line drawn on a chart. Up close, on the bridge, it is nothing of the kind. It is a continuous series of small corrections with the wind pushing one way, current pulling another, the helmsman easing back toward the heading over and over and over. The straight line on the chart is not what the pilot experienced. It's what was left after a thousand corrections averaged out. The line is real, the line is also not the process.
The measure I had wrong
Here's what I've come to believe, and I hold it carefully because I'm still testing it. The ordinary quality does not develop by never faltering, rather it develops by returning.
"For the righteous falls seven times and rises again" (Proverbs 24:16). Notice what that verse does not say. It doesn't say the righteous man falls less often than others, or falls less far, or eventually stops falling. It says he gets up. The distinguishing mark is the rising, and it's assumed there will be a seventh time. Which means I have been measuring the wrong thing my whole life. I've been measuring how far I fell and how badly, keeping a private ledger of failures and treating each one as evidence against me. But if Proverbs is describing the actual mechanism, then the measure isn't the falling at all.
The measure is how quickly I come back.
That's what "more than ordinary degree" might mean. Not that a man drifted less than everyone else. That he returned faster, and kept returning, until returning became the ordinary quality as it developed, over years, past what anyone would call ordinary.
Three questions worth the discomfort
Which ordinary quality have I genuinely developed — and if I'm honest about it, was that steady work, or was it a hundred returns?
What am I currently calling failure that is actually just the correction phase?
If the real measure is how fast I come back rather than how far I fell, how am I actually doing?
I found the third one harder than I expected. Not because the answer was bad, but because I had never once asked it. I had spent so long grading myself on the falling that the returning had gone entirely uncounted and by that measure I have been doing considerably better than I thought.
Why this is good news
If development required never drifting, almost none of us could do it. The entry requirement would be a kind of steadiness that human beings don't have. But if development is what happens through the returning, then the entry requirement is showing up again. And that is the one thing that is always available. There is no morning when it isn't. It doesn't depend on how yesterday went, as a matter of fact, it only exists because of how yesterday went. Roosevelt's second man isn't settling for less. He's describing what is actually on offer, and it turns out to be on offer to everyone. Ordinary qualities. Developed further than ordinary.
Not by holding a perfect heading. By correcting, again, toward it, just wobbling along life's journey
