In his final letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos shared a remarkable passage from Richard Dawkins’ ‘The Blind Watchmaker’: “If living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”
Bezos used this scientific fact as a metaphor: the natural pull of the world is towards equilibrium, towards sameness, towards being normal. It takes continuous work and energy to remain distinctive. This, he argued, applies not only to biology but also to companies, institutions and individual lives.
That insight strikes at the heart of Pakistan’s challenges today. As a nation, we have fallen into the trap of worshipping ‘normal’. Instead of struggling to stay distinctive, we have made sameness, conformity and inertia our default mode. The result is stagnation in our institutions, businesses, and even in our cultural mindset. Unless we choose the harder path of differentiation, our future risks being one of wasted potential, entrenched poverty and perpetual crisis.
We have built a society that glorifies being ‘normal’. Jobs and careers remain unchanged, generation after generation. Sons become what their fathers were, not out of choice but because venturing beyond the ‘normal’ feels too risky. Our institutions – from bureaucracy to education – operate on autopilot, recycling the same methods and practices for decades, rarely innovating, rarely reforming. Cultural norms discourage questioning, curiosity, and creativity. Conformity is praised, while disruption is seen as disrespectful or destabilising.
This embrace of ‘normal’ has consequences. Innovation is distrusted. Disruption is resisted. Mediocrity feels safer than excellence. As Dawkins’ metaphor suggests, our institutions have stopped doing the hard work needed to remain alive and distinctive. They have slowly merged into their environment – corruption, inefficiency, inertia – until their uniqueness as public-serving bodies is barely visible.
History shows us that nations that broke free from ‘normal’, adopted bold and unconventional policies, paid a price for differentiation – but reaped the benefits of transformation.
South Korea in the 1960s was poorer than much of Africa. Within a generation, it became a technology and manufacturing powerhouse. The government nurtured national champions like Samsung and Hyundai but demanded global competitiveness. They didn’t settle for normal; they chose world-class. Today, South Korea is synonymous with excellence in technology, automobiles, and culture, exporting not just products but global leadership in innovation.
Singapore, when expelled from Malaysia in 1965, had no resources, not even water security. But Lee Kuan Yew refused to let his new nation sink into despair. By choosing integrity, efficiency and relentless innovation, Singapore leapfrogged into one of the most advanced economies in the world. Its distinctiveness is visible not only in wealth but also in governance – a model of meritocracy, efficiency, and clean administration in a region where corruption is the norm.
Ireland in the 1980s faced high unemployment and mass emigration. It made a bold choice: slash corporate taxes to virtually the lowest in the world, embrace globalisation and rebrand itself as Europe’s tech hub. Today, it hosts the European headquarters of global technology firms like Google, Facebook (Meta), Apple and Microsoft. Once called the ‘sick man of Europe’, Ireland now ranks among the wealthiest nations in per capita income, with exports at the centre of its success story.
Vietnam, devastated by war, famine, and decades of poverty, chose to differentiate in the 1980s with the Doi Moi reforms. It restructured its economy, opened to trade and focused on becoming an export powerhouse. Within three decades, it emerged as a competitor to China in manufacturing, textiles, and electronics. Global brands today rely on Vietnam as a key node in their supply chains. A country once associated only with war is now associated with factories, exports, and growth.
The common lesson is clear: differentiation is essential for progress. Distinctiveness requires bold strategies, sacrifice, risk-taking, discipline and constant reinvention. Clearly, the nations that resist the pull of ‘normal’ achieve dignity, prosperity and global relevance.
By contrast, Pakistan’s ‘normal’ is a litany of dysfunction that we treat as unchangeable. We have normalised chronic electricity shortages and circular debt, as though perpetual blackouts are part of national identity. We have normalised weak governance, corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, where the system exists to serve the elite rather than the citizens.
We have normalised an outdated, dysfunctional education system, where rote memorisation is mistaken for learning, leaving youth ill-prepared for global competition. We have normalised living under IMF programmes with deep economic stagnation, where exports remain low, the tax base is narrow, and innovation is limited to slogans rather than strategies.
Even in business, mediocrity has become the default. Too many enterprises in Pakistan thrive not by competing globally but by surviving behind protectionist walls and exploiting monopolies. Risk-taking, research and innovation are rare; risk aversion and rent-seeking are common. Instead of imagining the next Samsung or Hyundai, we settle for keeping the status quo intact.
These failings are the consequence of our addiction to normal and mediocrity. Generations have grown up believing this is ‘how Pakistan is’. The mindset of the status quo is the true enemy of progress.
Jeff Bezos ended his letter with a truth worth repeating: “You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. Don’t let the world make you typical.”
For Pakistan, paying that price means hard reforms – dismantling entrenched interests, breaking patronage networks and confronting inefficiencies. It means prioritising long-term competitiveness over short-term populism. It means citizens and leaders alike must stop romanticising normal and start demanding excellence.
Differentiation in Pakistan would mean transforming governance by digitising state services, introducing transparency and ensuring meritocracy in leadership. It would mean empowering education with curricula that encourage critical thinking, creativity and entrepreneurship rather than rote memorisation. It would mean fostering a business culture that rewards risk-taking, promoting investment through unconventional bold reforms like drastic cuts in tax rates like Ireland and aspiring to be globally competitive.
This is not an easy path. Distinctiveness never is. It requires energy, focus and resilience. But the alternative is to remain trapped in our familiar equilibrium. And for nations, equilibrium does not mean literal death; it means something more painful: entrenched poverty, wasted potential and endless suffering for generations to come.
Pakistan’s future does not have to mirror its past. We can choose a different path – one where innovation is embraced, disruption is respected and originality is rewarded. We can build institutions that serve citizens rather than themselves, businesses that compete globally rather than locally, and schools that produce creators rather than imitators.
But to do so, we must break free from our addiction to the ‘normal’. Differentiation is not just survival; it is the only way to escape mediocrity.
If South Korea, Singapore, Ireland and Vietnam could do it under far harsher circumstances, so can we. The only question is whether we will summon the courage to differentiate or whether we will remain comfortably trapped in the mediocrity we have mistaken for stability.
The writer is a former managing partner of a leading professional services firm and has done extensive work on governance in the public and private sectors. He tweets/posts @Asad_Ashah
