Do You Want to Be Normal?

Well, do you?

This may sound like a perfectly simple question, but the answer may be quite a bit more complicated than you may think. Consider for a moment what it means to be normal.

By definition, you will be like everyone else, achieving mediocre success and leading a rather average existence. You’ll have a regular 9-to-5 job that gets you about the same salary as the majority, you’ll drive an average vehicle, have an average significant other, and feel a constant sense of being pretty average. You’ll hit your highs and your lows, but in the end, you’ll be hitting the middle more often than anything else.

You may not want to be an “eccentric” outlier like the crazed fellow depicted above, but there is certainly something to be said about falling outside of the norm. The richest and most successive people this world has ever seen are, by definition, not normal. It’s not normal to be the CEO of a multinational company. It’s not normal to be a millionaire. It’s not normal to invent the theory of relativity and then get resurrected as a talking robot head.

The human population falls on a bell curve on just about every characteristic. You’ve got short people and you’ve got tall people, but most people fall somewhere in between. The same can be said about vocational and monetary success. If you hope to become famous or to be known as extraordinary, you must not do as others do. You have to be different. Some may say that this means you need to be “special”, whereas others may simply describe you as being crazy. Falling outside of the normal range, there’s no saying which direction you may take.

If you keep doing as you are doing, you will inevitably hit a plateau. Conventional means will only get you so far, so getting to the next level requires new and innovative ideas. From great minds to great athletes, true heroes to infamous villains, the one thing that they have in common is that they are not normal.

Albert Einstein is mind-blowing with his intelligence, but he was far from normal. Shigeru Miyamoto has led Nintendo into everyone’s living room, but he is also known for being a very “eccentric” individual. The best authors and artists, like Pablo Picasso and Edgar Allan Poe, were notoriously lacking in the sanity department, but that’s how they created their greatest work. You can even say the same thing about Dot Com Pho original John Chow. He’s managed to make a lot of money online, but I think we’d all agree that he is far from normal.

No one will deny that Adolf Hitler did some very horrible things and his motivations were clearly not in the right place, but he was also an absolute genius. Hitler was also able to rally the German people amidst a horrible depression. He was able to mobilize military forces to take control of most of Europe. He was brilliant. Unfortunately, he was also quite insane. Falling outside the norm is very much a double-edged sword.

Being normal is relatively safe, but it is also the route of the mediocre. In order to have the opportunity to be extraordinary and achieve great things (i.e., hitting the right end of the bell curve), you must also the run the risk of utter insanity and complete failure (i.e., the left end of the bell curve). Such is the nature of being unconventional. No great reward was ever achieved without great risk.