A few years ago, quite a few actually, I designed a history leadership module that turned into one of my most popular.
I called it “The Extraordinary Ordinary Day”. It took people into and through the story of US Air Flight 1529, the one that did an emergency water landing on the Hudson River. My title was my theme–that a person can enter into an ordinary day but then be placed in an extraordinary situation.
Today, January 20, 2026, I felt something like that when I bumped into this account of another January 20. It felt ordinary to some at the time. We know it was much different than ordinary in actuality.
