The Case for Being Weird
If branding is differentiation, normal is death
I don’t know who George Mack is, but nearly 300,000 people on Twitter apparently do. He writes about ideas, online virality, human behavior, etc. It’s the sort of airport read memetic non-fiction I personally try to avoid (too many years of being force fed leadership books in megachurch world), but I saw a “shower thought” image shared recently that struck a nerve.
Nobody tells stories of when you did the expected. They only tell stories when you did the unexpected. Normal behaviour costs nothing in the short term but disappears into the abyss. Unconventional behaviour costs a social price in the short term — but the actions live on as story assets in the future.
This I can get behind, because this is about differentiation. And differentiation is the crux of branding. And branding is something I spend all day thinking about.
Mack continues:
Your personal brand is defined by your weirdness, eccentricities, and irrational behavior. If you remove them in order to fit in with the tribe, you remove all future stories and memories that tribe will tell about you.
If not yourself, why bother?
I was having a design session in the backyard studio with a local friend last week, discussing a real estate data side project he’s working on. His particular project makes use of publicly-available data sources, so in theory anyone could do it. But people aren’t going to sign up for the data; they’re after a storyteller to weave a tale using the data. His unique combination of experience, worldview, and an ability to connect multiple pieces of disparate data together to find new insights — that’s what people care about. That’s worth remembering, and passing along to other like-minded folks.
In a world where we increasingly “follow” individuals and grow fond of their voices, it’s their “weirdness, eccentricities, and irrational behavior” that we’re drawn to. So why aim for normal? The people we’re listening to are specifically not normal. That’s what makes them interesting. If “normal behavior costs nothing” it’s worth nothing. But your particular brand of weird might be exactly what someone is looking for.
Stop editing your quirks
If anything, you should lean into what makes you you. This is exactly what we counsel our brand clients to do — find the things that are the most you, and capitalize on them. Not only does this drastically increase your chance of finding your people, it’s more sustainable in the longterm. Trying to be what other people want is a recipe for living a split life, chasing a dragon you’ll never catch, and burning yourself up in the process. But being yourself is sustainable, because it’s natural.
“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” — Dolly Parton
Be unconventional. Be memorable. Find your own version of buying fries for the table when you sit down at a restaurant. Or taking up Magic: the Gathering in your 30s and really go all in. Stop worrying about what other people think; they’re not thinking about you anyway. But they are wondering where the next cool, unique, fun, eccentric things that don’t quite fit in might be. And that’s where we all thrive.
Enjoying these.