Fitting In Is Overrated

Not sure why, but I was thinking about my junior high school choir the other day. We were about as good as you’d expect. The goal, it seemed, was to blend in with each other and actually finish a song. Low standards, but necessary.

There was one boy in our group who was louder than all of us, to the point of distraction. But not only louder, he was also a step off from the rest of us. Mind you, this wasn’t done on purpose, at least I don’t think so. If you were watching, it was cringeworthy.

No matter what the choir director did, the boy never really joined us in a song. It was like he was singing over a record or tape in his own world.

Oh, how the director tried to get him in line. She spent half her time reining him in while most of us snickered and made fun of him.

That memory makes me sad. I totally get what the director was trying to do, but this child had some gifts. One gift was that he could not get embarrassed. That’s a gift I would have liked to have. The other was that he could really belt it out. I mean Pavarotti belt it out. No microphone needed.

The big problem was this: junior high choir was not built to reward those gifts.

Choir rewarded harmony. Blending in. Following the group. Staying on time. So of course this boy looked like a problem. He was too loud, too much. You might say he was just “more”.

I keep thinking about how often life works this way.

The choir director, think system, noticed what did not fit before it noticed what might be special.

That’s how a lot of life works.

The system notices what does not fit before it notices what might be valuable.

And that may be the real problem with so much conventional advice. A lot of it is not designed to help you become more fully yourself. It is designed to make you easier to manage.

Easy to Manage

A few months back I wrote ​an article about leaning into your crazy​. The TLDR: the more you lean into what makes you unique, the more opportunities you’ll create for yourself.

In fact, the point of this article runs against just about every piece of conventional advice I’ve ever received.

The struggle doesn’t stop in choir.

School teaches you to follow directions. Work teaches you to act professional. Society teaches you to read the room. Even the people who love you most will often tell you to be careful, realistic, and not get too carried away.

When I decided to start a business, almost everyone around me thought I was making a mistake (and told me so).

But most of this advice sounds wise. Some of it is.

Be patient. Keep your head down. Don’t rock the boat. Keep the benefits. Bird in the hand.

In the short term, that kind of advice can help you survive. In the long term, it can make you forget who you are.

Maybe that’s why so many talented people feel stuck. They followed the rules. They said the right things. They became dependable, promotable, respectable.

And somewhere along the way, they became interchangeable.

The problem with sanding down your edges is that your edges are often where the value is. The obsession. Your strange curiosity. The point of view that does not quite match everyone else’s. The part of you that feels like too much may actually be the part worth building around.

What makes you hard to manage may be exactly what makes you hard to replace.

Look Around, Look Around

Many of you know that my oldest was diagnosed on the autism spectrum when they were a little over two years old. It turned into a learning adventure for all of us, but especially for me as a father.

They were always doing things differently than everyone else.

If there was a circle of kids doing an activity, they were outside the circle. If everyone was running in one direction, they were going another. If the group was building with Lincoln Logs, they were in the corner working with LEGO bricks.

For a long time, I didn’t know what to do with that. In some moments, if I’m being honest, I was embarrassed. Like somehow I had done something wrong. Like my job as a parent was to help them fit in better, act more like the group, follow the script.

But somewhere along the way, something shifted in me.

I started to see a kind of superpower in my oldest. It was the lack of embarrassment. The willingness to do what felt right to them, even if it looked different to everyone else. The ability to make decisions in everyday human interactions that, if I’m being honest, I’m not always sure I would have had the courage to make myself.

Looking back now, I can see that in many cases they had it right, and I had it wrong.

Most of us work so hard to conform. Conform to the rules. Conform to what is expected. We get very good at reading signals, adjusting ourselves, and becoming acceptable.

And after 25 years in the business world, I’ve noticed something. The people who did everything right often ended up with the safest résumé and the emptiest feeling.

The people I know who spent their lives conforming are often the most unhappy. They look successful on paper, but many of them are still searching for something real. The ones who were a little harder to categorize, a little less interested in fitting neatly into the system, are often the ones living the most fully.

That doesn’t mean every unconventional choice leads to happiness or success.

But it does mean that fitting in is wildly overrated. And in a world where so many people are being trained to think, act, and sound alike, it is certainly not a competitive advantage.

And maybe that’s the deeper danger of so much conventional advice.

It teaches us how to belong. But not always how to live.

To Take or Not Take Advice

So before you take advice from anyone, ask a harder question.

Is this helping me become more fully myself?

Or is it just helping me fit more comfortably into a system that was never built for me in the first place?

The world rewards fitting in early. It rewards distinctiveness later.

The trick is not waiting so long to reclaim the part of you that was different all along.

Because playing along can help for a while. But sooner or later, if you want a life that feels like yours, you have to stop singing everyone else’s song.