Ordinary Magic: A Manifesto
Ordinary Magic: A Manifesto
When our son was eight, he announced that he wanted to be a mountain runner.
We followed him. At first my wife and I called what we were doing "trail speed adventures," because there was a lot of walking involved. Eventually, running became ordinary. Before school. In the dark. On the trails. His declaration built a running family. His older sister dove straight into the deep end and won the USATF junior national trail marathon title. This past summer she and I ran the Leadville 100 together... she won the under-20 division at eighteen, possibly the youngest finisher in the race's history, and we crossed every mile of the "race across the sky" side by side.
What stuns me isn't our results. It's realizing I spent decades circling a gift without finding it. And knowing that I needed my kids to teach me how to have fun and take risks again.
Somewhere in professional life, I'd stopped setting goals big enough to require transformation. The consequences felt too high. So I chose comfort and called it wisdom.
The reason most people don't achieve their full potential isn't because they lack talent. They fall short because the first step feels too big. Dreams feel dangerous. The novel never gets written. The race never gets run. The business idea lives forever in the notes app.
Not because people lack capability, but because they never take the leap. And because they stop taking the next steps.
The gap between "I want to run a marathon" and "I ran marathon" feels enormous.
The gap between "I want to run a marathon" and "run one mile today" is trivial.
The same is true of writing a novel. You don't write a novel. You write a paragraph. Every day. Eventually you write a page. Then two. Novels aren't born from lightning strikes of inspiration. They emerge from stacking words on the page, day after day. Like bricks in a wall. Like miles on a trail.
I'm a professor of literary studies. For years I taught the standard curriculum... Modernist Poetry, the Epic Tradition, disciplinary courses designed to reproduce the PhD. Then my university cut the lecture courses I had taught for years, and I faced a choice: mourn the old model or build something better.
I chose to build.
I returned to first principles. What do students actually need? Not more content delivery. They need habits and practices for living through difficulty. They need language for desire, loss, meaning, and connection. They need what the Greeks called eudaimonia... not happiness as feeling, but happiness as flourishing, the good life lived in full awareness of mortality and constraint.
I started asking myself this basic question: If a course doesn't help students figure out how to live, what's it for? With this question in mind I developed and implemented new curriculum on "Heartbreak and Happiness" and "Birth and Death" to ask the hard questions and charge straight toward the most difficult discussions, the most urgent debates.
The same question applies to software. If an app doesn't help someone thrive, what's it for?
Call me weird, but my favorite phone-based game doesn't involve a gun or a racecar; it's called Prune.
You grow a tree. You trim branches. Light streams in and your tree reaches toward it, or it doesn't and branches die. You keep pruning until something beautiful emerges... or time runs out and you start again.
No score multipliers. No achievements. No daily rewards. Just the quiet work of shaping growth toward light.
That's what I mean by ordinary magic. Not lightning bolts from the sky. Not optimization hacks or gamified streaks. The slow accumulation of small efforts. Tending. Pruning. Stacking stones on a beach knowing the tide will take them. Writing one paragraph. Running one mile. Sitting with a difficult text until it opens.
You cannot optimize an orchard. You tend it.
Ultra-Normal builds apps for people who do the work.
Some apps help students read faster and write better. Some help people name their fears and take the next honest step toward bigger ambitions. Some offer daily practices drawn from centuries of wisdom about character formation. Some are just contemplative play... arranging leaves and stones, watching light change, letting art dissolve back into nature.
What connects them is a conviction: friction is not the bug of a good life. It's the curriculum.
We don't believe in frictionless. We believe in the right friction... the kind that builds capacity, reveals character, and presumes tomorrow. Cultivation over critique. Building over breaking. The orchard over the ruins.
For heroes of daily life. For anyone who believes the distance between "I want to" and "I did" is just the next forty-eight hours.
Ultra-Normal. Operating on ordinary magic.
Justin Neuman
Professor | Founder | App-Developer | Director of EveryDay Magic at Ultra-Normal LLC