Recently read this in James Clear’s email newsletter:

If you want to be in the top 1% of a particular domain, then you can’t take your cues from and follow the social norms of 99% of people. This is harder than it sounds. We are wired to imitate. The further you want to climb, the more carefully you need to construct your tribe.

It’s so true. We’re memetic creatures, and our mammalian part of the brain is hard-coded to want to fit in, to follow the crowd, to learn how to do things in alignment with one another. To stick out is to court death, literally. From an evolutionary point of view, I can imagine why - cast away from your tribe, out alone in the wild, is certain death. Death by sabre tooth tiger. But we live in a different age now. There’s no sabre tooth tigers around. Most of the danger we perceive are subjective, not objective. But our brain had not caught up, at least the mammalian, social part.

If anything, to succeed right now, we need more diversity of thought and creativity. That’s what is profitable, even if all cylinders are firing off in fear of tribal rejection. What I love about that quote is the heuristic it offers: if I ever find myself doing what 99% of the crowd is doing, I probably won’t be able to go as far as I would want to. (Yes, maybe you might still find some success. Maybe you will find your own version of success, if that entails fitting in. All good. No judgement.) Being selective of your tribe might help, following people in the 1% might be useful, but……I feel like that’s still taking cues from others. The 1% might be truly genius, or be truly insane. You’d never know, till it’s too late, if you simply imitated from a smaller group instead of a larger one. 

But if the crowd isn’t a reliable signal of what success looks like, and if simply avoiding what they do won’t offer much of a path forward, then what?

I think, I’ll follow my curiosity, my growth, my bliss, thank you very much. Nobody can be me me, after all. You’re not even the 1%, you’re the 0.00000000000000000000001%. Utterly unique, or hopelessly so. Opportunity or burden, it depends. I hope to use that as opportunity instead. And by following my own learning trajectory, I follow where my craft leads me; follow the cues that the environment gives me, in relation to how I responded and how well I learned. Instead of mimicking someone else’s paths or patterns, I poked reality with something, and whatever that got spit out on the other side became my next stepping stone to poke reality with. I iterate and iterate, and the next thing I know, these stepping stones became a path. It came to my own.  

Follow your bliss, not the crowd.