Stand out

As my kids rapidly head towards school age, I’m spending a lot more time remembering my experiences in school, and all the ways that school consciously or unconsciously shaped who I am as a person.

As a way of preparing us for adult life, there are a number of things school does which are completely counterproductive.

One is by creating an environment where you see the same ~100 people every single day for 6 years. You’re exposed to their opinions (and the consequences of those opinions), every single day. You (understandably) soon come to believe that what they think about you is important, and that you need to change aspects of yourself in order to safely fit in.

This is not at all what adult life is like, especially for a solo pro who is not full-time employed by a single organisation. There a very few contexts in which we are subjected to the opinions of the same few people over and over again.

Rather than changing ourselves to fit in with whoever we happen to have been lumped with, a better strategy is to stand out in all the ways that we’re unique, and let the people for whom that resonates gravitate towards us.

(Note: Now that Elon Musk and his deranged, right-wing fascistic tendencies have destroyed twitter, any screenshots you see from me of the type above are likely to come from Threads. Not that I love Zuckerberg either, to be honest, but he and Meta seem the lesser of two evils at this point, and I’m enjoying Threads. You can find me here if you want to hang out).