We Were Born to Belong - But Not to Conform
Stressed out, lacking passion, lacking drive
It’s Thursday night, the work drinks are free, it’s the first fun you’ve had all week. Conversations are flowing and you’re a million miles away from the boring meetings you had with clients and team mates earlier in the day. How did we end up here? How do we end up doing these jobs that are good on paper but leave us feeling a bit crumpled.
It’s because of a multitude of reasons, but nobody ever wrote a good 1200 word blog with more than a couple of points – so I’ve chosen just one point. Conformity. To conform is a super smart evolutionary adaptation of humans. To conform is to “behave according to socially acceptable conventions or standards.” Can you imagine how difficult it would have been to get anything done, ever, if we all had different ideas of what conventions and standards are?
Think about burping. In the UK it is one of the quickest ways to receive dirty looks to burp at the dinner table. In China it is a compliment to the chef, you’re full, content and showing your appreciation. These two countries have evolved simultaneously but separately. The same action, a totally different meaning. Conventions aren’t truths, they are just how we conform to society.
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When you run back through your whole life, you will realise that when you were five, you conformed to what your parents or older siblings did. You wanted to emulate them, wear the same clothes and play with the same toys. By the time you were a teenager you conformed to your peers. For better or worse you all acquired similar habits. The same thing happened at university, maybe your fashion sense, political views and language changed.
Then you get your first job and again you are presented with new norms and behaviours. What was socially acceptable at university is no longer okay at your place of work. A good manager will give you feedback, maybe scolding you like an adult would a child, it stings but it helps you to fit in, maybe even to belong. This feedback comes from a place of protection. Your manager wants you to remain in the tribe. Those of us who couldn’t conform, who found it difficult to pick up on social cues were kicked out of the tribe.
So fitting in is good, it keeps us in the tribe. Once we feel like we fit in, like we belong, we relax. When we relax we are able to see the world from a higher vantage point. Much like we discussed a previous blog, our noradrenaline reduces, our dopamine boosts and we feel a whole lot more creative.
Conformity never lead to the lightbulb or the Apple Macintosh
So conformity is good, but it has never led to the creation of the Apple Macintosh or the lightbulb. The two Steve’s sat in their parents’ garages making computers and Thomas Edison spent 1000s of hours failing to eventually create a working lightbulb. The world doesn’t change when people remain the same. Great companies start and products are invented when non-conforming individuals step out of line. The world changes when a critical mass of humanity slips out of alignment of the norms of society.
If you want to truly make a difference, to take a step to your wildest dream, you need to break the cycle. If you never break the cycle, you’ll end up lost in middle age. As Danté wrote 700 years ago:
“When I had travelled half of life’s way,
I found myself in a shadowed forest,
For I had lost the path that does not stray.”
I don’t want you to get halfway and find yourself in the shadows. Life is too short and there is too much to do.
What is the antidote to conforming? If you’ve read any of my articles, you’ll have a good guess. It is to find something that inspires you, something that you can become passionate about. It has never been easy to break the cycle of conformity, even less so now.
Yes, yes, yes, millennials and Gen Z are privileged
It is likely that you have had a life similar to mine. Privileged in the sense that you’ve lived a lot of it in the 21st century. Wi-Fi is a utility. War is a news story. What is even more likely is that you’ve had your interests, your curiosities, your passions, squashed down into you. Squashed to make way for exams and expectations. Your grandparents aren’t joking when they say they never sat as many exams as you. In the 1950s, a British 16 year-old sat about 5-10 exam papers with very little coursework, compared to 20+ exams and a heavy load of coursework in the 21st century. A conservative estimate would say that people now have to do well over double the amount of graded work at school.
So yes, life is objectively better now. But is it easier – the jury is out. What is clear is that what a child and young adult spends their time doing is less free and more directed. When you have three maths exams, your love of creativity or nature is likely going to take a backseat. It is sad, but true.
Humanity is at a critical juncture. Technology is ready to climb up a cliff edge. One positive I believe to come out of that is for us humans to spend more time being human. What I can guarantee you is that the education system will not catch up to this. It will be impossible to reverse the tide of exams and expectations before technology really reaches the cliff edge of change.
So, with everything that is hard in life – it is you that needs to do the work. Your parents, your teachers, your friends, your schools, universities and companies are not going to do it for you. If you sit around waiting for someone to tell you to do something, you will be waiting a long time.
Find your passions
Your passions have not left you, they have just been squashed inside of you. You need to open up enough to find them and build your library of love.
First, you need to build awareness of what it is you love(d) doing.
Try this: scroll back to the oldest photos on your phone or find some old family pictures. Study them, ask yourself, ask your parents, what did I spend my time doing? What did I love?
Second, take action by taking up a hobby, travelling or reading something new.
Find one of those hobbies you did as a child and start it again. Steve Jobs famously dropped out of university so he could drop in on the classes that interested him. He felt bad that his working-class parents were paying such exorbitant fees for tuition which he didn’t really like, so he dropped out. One of the classes he dropped into was calligraphy. At the time it was simply an interest of his. He was mesmerised by the wonderfully decorated posters all around the campus and thought, I want a piece of that. At the time did he have any clue that he would revolutionise computers by making them seem more approachable, even friendly, with his playful fonts? I doubt it. He dropped in because it sparked a passion.
Third, remember the golden rules of passions:
· Nobody ever planned their passions
· Nobody ever got passionate about anything whilst they were stressed out
· Nobody ever got passionate whilst caring about what others think
· Finally, say yes more than you say no.
Soon, I will be off to China for a fitness race (yes, like all 31-year-old men I have got into Hyrox). Will I have the confidence to burp my appreciation? Probably in the hotel room to disgust Liv, in the restaurant, probably not. Will going there inspire me and uncover some new passions? Who knows, but if the past is anything to go by, it probably will.
Deepen Your Curiosity
Steve Jobs on going after your passions. They will never make sense to start, but perhaps when you look backwards, they will.
One of the greatest tools to non-conform is by finding your strengths, what you are uniquely good at. A great book for that is Marcus Buckingham’s Love + Work
