What is normal? Normal is the average, and a consensus. Therefore, to be normal is to be the median version of anyone and everyone you could be.

When we seek to improve ourselves, do we move from one normal to another? Normal doesn't learn to juggle, play a musical instrument, speak a foreign language, or train to become a doctor who saves lives in some far-flung war-torn nation — but in doing these things, we do so at the behest of and for the benefit of those who are normal, inspiring them to dream.

Normal builds empires, but it is not their architects — nor does it imagine them, or is it the inspiration for their rise. An empire exists not to maintain a mundane status quo, but to be the environment for the attainment of excellence.

Normal is comfortable with its lot in life. But, to what end do we fling ourselves into the unknown and the unfamiliar? Because failures are the elemental sinews of our successes, and no-one ruled an empire from an armchair, not when a throne could be hewn from a dream.

In these curious modern times we find ourselves in, to be normal is not an ambition for the ambitious, and insufficient an aspiration for those who dream of building empires, and — thus — changing the world.

Yes, we must change the world, though not for the sake of change, but for the sake of our children and a verdant realm of nature to surround them — out from which would spring those golden futures we dare to dream.

But a word of caution for the dreamers: Be mindful of those who are normal, for it is to them we gift our empires, and whose sweat is broken in building them.

We the dreamers are the ones who redefine normal again and again. Yet we are not normal, because we imagine ourselves living in the dreams of future empires.