I spent over an hour this week on a call with a consultant I’d never met. Towards the end, the conversation turned to children, because it always does.
They told me what they want for their kid: to stay weird. To be comfortable being different, to challenge things respectfully, and never to learn the trick of blending in to get by. People who learn that trick, they said, don’t change anything, because they’ve already spent everything changing themselves.
I agreed. Then, with permission, I told them their website was everything they didn’t want their kid to be.
It was a good website. Clean, well built. But I’d just heard an hour of strange, unrepeatable stories about what they’d built and why they’d walked away to do this. None of it was there. It said what every consultant’s website says, in the order every consultant says it. It was nice.
Blandness happens through a hundred sensible choices: copying what others do, writing “we help organisations”, taking yourself out of the picture because it feels like showing off. Add them up and you get something that could belong to anyone, which means it belongs to no one.
And sometimes it isn’t a choice at all. It’s armour.
Most of us carry scars nobody can see. {Lewis: one of yours, if you want to name it.} A time when being different made you a target. A life that taught you the safest place is the middle of the crowd. So we blend in, and it works. It gets us through.
But you can’t hide the scar without hiding the rest of you. The things that hurt are often tangled up with the things that make you brilliant. Put one out of sight and the other goes with it. The magic gets packed away with the pain.
We do it at work every day.
We leave half of ourselves at the door: the history, the scars, the bits that don’t fit the job description. Yet that’s usually where the insight lives. The person who has lived on the other side of a service knows things the service never will.
Your whole self isn’t the risk. It’s the point.
Weird isn’t a substitute for competent. But once competence is established, being yourself is what makes the right people think: Oh thank God, this is the one. Nobody remembers nice, and nobody hires it either.
So, the advice I gave on the call is the advice I’d give the kid. Be weird. Be as weird as you possibly can, and then weirder than that. Not louder. More yourself, scars and all, in public, where the right people can find you and the wrong ones can leave.
And if you lead people, build somewhere they feel safe enough to do the same.
They said their brain was itchy afterwards. Good. That’s what it feels like the first time you stop blending in.
