How to stand out from the crowd
As a mentor to several young and ambitious professionals, I am often asked, “What should I do to stand out from the crowd?”. I usually respond to the question with a question of my own: “If you enter the office tomorrow morning and see everyone running away from something, what would you do?”
Over the years, I have found that one of the best ways to stand out from the crowd is to move in the opposite direction. If you see a crowd running away from something and then see one lone challenger running towards it instead, he or she automatically stands out and gets differentiated from the rest of the crowd. Now, let me address the obvious problem with this advice right at the outset: “What if the crowd is actually right in running away from whatever it is running away from?”. Yes indeed, applied mindlessly, this advice could get you noticed … and killed! Assuming you’re like most people and want more than just a brief moment of glory before you depart for the afterlife, you need to pair this advice with an equally important caveat, phrased as a quick question to ask yourself before you start running: “Do I have an ace up my sleeve?”. It only makes sense to run towards a rabid dog that everyone is running away from if you also happen to have a tranquilizer gun that you’re willing and able to use! If not, let discretion be the better part of valor and live to fight another day!
With this important caveat built in, I am now ready to share my success tip of the month: “Run towards problems everyone runs away from … but pick your battles wisely!”
Situations where I have seen this principle work are too numerous to be listed, but a few examples are worth mentioning to help illustrate the point and bring it to life in the context of real-life situations we face at work. As a consultant, I can readily recall several situations during internal project kick-off meetings, where it is plainly evident that one of the work modules involves analytical heavy-lifting. Asking for volunteers to lead that module invariably leads to a predictable result: everyone suddenly finds the carpet mesmerizing, and can’t seem to take their eyes off it! The person who does volunteer immediately stands out in my mind, even if – and this is interesting – he or she subsequently needs quite a bit of help to do it. It is the attitude that stands out immediately, even if the competence has some gaps. But it does not have to be about analytical prowess alone, if that is not your forte. Taking a tough client meeting head on when everyone is trying to wiggle their way out of it, taking on that grueling trip to a remote location that everyone is finding excuses for, or taking on a public speaking engagement with a challenging audience; these are all examples of stuff at work that can make you shine.
Why does it work?
Interestingly enough, once you’ve shone the spotlight on yourself by running towards what everyone is running away from, you will find that a lot of help is available to ensure you don’t stumble and fall. There are three simple reasons for this. First, as you are now in the spotlight for having taken on what is well understood to be a tough challenge, your leaders and even your team members are going to be much more likely to provide you with whatever help they can (especially compared to a scenario where they don’t know you exist!). Second, they will not only want to, but also need to help you, because it is in their own interest to ensure you don’t muck it up. That’s because the work you’ve signed up for tends to be the most critical piece anyway, so it becomes everyone’s problem to ensure you don’t fail. Third, it turns out (most of the time, at least) that things appear much harder at first than they actually are (this is backed by behavioral science, by the way) and so chances are it will be less challenging to actually do something than it appears to be at first. Even if your results end up not being as great as expected, you will get noticed for having the right attitude, and you will also benefit from the low-base effect (people tend to set lower expectations for tasks they think are challenging, so that even a moderately good performance stands out much more than an excellent performance on a routine task), yet another behavioral science phenomenon that helps the risk-taker.
Beyond office work
This success tip applies quite broadly, and certainly well beyond regular office work in teams (as the examples above might have suggested). Great entrepreneurial success is typically created by solving problems everyone faces, but no one has solved yet. Great investing success comes from buying when everyone is selling in a panic and selling when everyone is buying up greedily. In other words, all legendary investors are fundamentally people who make it a point to run counter to the herd. Venturing even further afield beyond business, the prettiest girl is often intrigued by the guy who does not drool every time he sees her (as all the others do); children and family members love and respect folks who take on and help solve their toughest problems (especially as opposed to lecturing to them about how they could have avoided being in the problem situation); and societies and countries are usually led by people who, at some point or another, took those problems head-on that others cowered away from!
What it takes
Assuming I’ve convinced you that running towards problems might not be as suicidal an idea as you may have thought at first, you might be wondering what it actually takes for a person to do it. Are people who swim against the tide fundamentally different from the rest of us? If so, how? I believe there is but one quality in a person that allows him to run against the crowd, and that relates to emotional intelligence. In the moment when we first come face to face with a really tough challenge, our “flight-or-fight” impulse, programmed into our ancient reptilian brain (called the amygdala), tends to kick in and most often, it instructs us to run away from the threat. Resisting that instinctive impulse requires a key emotional intelligence attribute, called impulse control. People who stand out are able to put the instinctive flight impulse on pause: once this is done, it becomes quite easy to evaluate the situation using the pre-frontal cortex (the modern brain) and then take an informed decision on whether to take the challenge head-on or to consciously avoid doing so.
So the million-dollar question then becomes, can one improve impulse control? I am not the expert on this topic, but the experts claim that the answer is yes (this also happens to be the answer we all want to hear and also the answer that helps the said experts make money, so caution is advised). Some basic advice on how to improve impulse control can be found here, and some better suited advice (in my humble opinion) appears here, but there are a lot more – and possibly better – sources that you can tap into with a little effort.
The key is to be willing to make that effort!
