Embracing Your Weirdness
[Music]
have you ever felt
like you didn’t fit in have you ever
looked down and thought
how did i get here what am i wearing
well that might not be totally
unjustified
the chances of you existing are
incredibly
slim the only reason you’re here is
because of a precise combination
of four billion years of survival and
reproduction
of every single one of your ancestors
some very smart people have actually run
the figures
and worked out that the odds of your
specific
combination of genetics existing at one
in ten
to the power of two million six hundred
and eighty five thousand
that number isn’t just larger than all
the particles in the universe
it’s larger than all the particles in
the universe
if each particle was itself another
universe it’s larger than the likelihood
of the entire
2 million person population of northern
ireland
all rolling a trillion-sided dice
and each getting a seven basically
the chances of you existing are zero
and yet somehow against all those odds
you’re here what if i told you that this
miracle
of your existence means that embracing
your weirdness
is your duty to yourself the entire
human race
and the universe at large i want to
invite you to believe
that embracing your weirdness will
improve your entire life
competitively socially and spiritually
let me tell you how i realized this and
like all
good philosophical insights it begins
on a reality tv dating show
it’s 2015 and i’m on the south coast of
majorca
looking out across the pool of a
beautiful multi-million pound villa
14 single guys and girls in swimwear are
getting changed ahead of tonight’s party
and there’s a few million people
watching so
obviously as you do i decided
that now would be an opportune moment
to have an existential crisis
i’m on a tv show and for the last few
weeks i’ve been watched by cameras
24 hours a day as the big name on campus
party boy
i thought i was unravels
internally i’ve been a club promoter
model for nearly a decade
so i thought i belonged in this world
but i was struggling to connect
i’d have these weird things i wanted to
talk about that would pop up in my head
like whether robot pets are ethical or
if there’s a version of the simulation
where we’re all made of ice cream
but then i’d remember the club promoter
party boy persona
i thought was me and i pushed those
thoughts away
so i continued to play the role
and as i scrabbled around inside looking
for the person
i thought i was i kept finding
nothing the thing is
when you hide your true self for long
enough you can bury it
under so many personas that you
genuinely
don’t know who you are anymore and i
don’t
think it’s just me maybe you have felt
this
too in my experience many of us
perhaps most of us spend an inordinate
amount of time trying to appear normal
out of sheer terror
that the people around us might realize
quite how
odd we truly are we fear that showing
this
real weird self will be the downfall of
our aspirations
so we round off the edges of our
personality and curb our quirks
until we’ve eroded everything unique
about us away
and the horror is that we succeed
it’s not that we’re bad or deceptive
it’s simply that the thoughts which
traverse our minds
sound absolutely nothing like what the
seemingly sane humans we meet every
day would ever think we live
in perpetual fear that the people who
know our outer voice
would ever get to hear what’s happening
inside of our heads
i want to convince you that your
weirdness is precisely
what you should embrace to become
successful desirable
and fulfilled you are a unique
collection of genetic predisposition
and the way you’ve dealt with past
traumas and the funny way you say the
letter s
and that thing only a few people know
that you like having
done to your feet all
of these characteristics have come
together to make up the unique person
who is
you but if we are so remarkable
why do we hide our true selves well
one reason is competitiveness we assume
that bosses and audiences don’t want
weird they want normal so in order to
succeed in the market
we should conform to their thinking
patterns
and appeal to the widest possible group
upon reflection we all know this is an
error
don’t we by doing what everyone else
does
we guarantee average results
i am astounded by how many people
want to be spectacular in life but also
wants to be normal
by being normal you are by definition
aiming for average normal people
get normal results weird people
get weird results on the 20th of october
1968 a 21 year old won gold
and set an olympic record when he high
jumped 2 meters 24
to mexico city games he was
quite weird he was a civil engineering
student
who missed the opening ceremony to see
the pyramids and sleep in his van
he literally wore odd shoes to jump in
and according to journalists looked like
a two-legged camel
or a guy falling off the back of a truck
his name was dick fosbury and his unique
jumping style known as the fosbri flop
is now responsible for every high jump
world record
in existence rather than trying to
conform
fosbury revolutionized track and field
by
fully utilizing everything he was
as naval ravikant says you can escape
competition through
authenticity because no one can beat you
at being you your unique value
is your weirdness it’s the fact that
your dad left
when you were young and that you cry far
too easily at happy films
and that you are more interested in the
pyramids than the opening ceremony
these things are not weaknesses
they are unique insights if you view
your life experiences with the
perspective
that they give you an insight which no
one else has
you start to see everything as an
advantage
another reason we hide our true selves
is because
socially on the surface the situation
looks even worse for the weirdos
especially in childhood
being different is not highly valued
if you’d look for me on the playground
at lunchtime you would have found me
in my history teacher mrs wilkinson’s
classroom
not doing detention but eating lunch
somewhere
where i couldn’t to be bullied i had
found
more connection in an empty classroom
than a hostile schoolyard because i
struggled to fit in
i want to tell every boy or girl
who has been bullied or felt alone that
all
their quirks are blessings that not
having a local accent might cause them
to be alienated
but in the future it means they can get
a job anywhere
in the world that dealing with isolation
as a child
might hurt but that they’ll be
unbeatably
self-sufficient once they’re an adult
that the fact they’re so sensitive means
they might take things to heart in
school
but that they will grow up to genuinely
understand their friends emotions
even when their friends don’t understand
them themselves
i want to tell them that all their
weirdnesses
are strengths to be embraced not
weaknesses to be embarrassed about
the problem is we map this schoolyard
popularity dynamic onto the real world
and presume that it still works
think for a second about the time that
you’ve fallen in love
just go back to that moment when you
realized it
and consider what you were thinking
was it i just adore how
easily replaceable they are
i’m so turned on by how they’re exactly
like
everyone else what i can’t get enough of
is the way their opinions are so
predictable probably not
our deception detectors are unbelievably
attuned we can tell when someone is
playing a role
even if they don’t know it themselves it
turns us off
admirable attractive compelling people
are the ones who are embracing not
hiding
their weirdness when it comes to being
popular and desirable
the act of embracing
is far more important than what you
embrace
spiritually the stakes are raised even
higher
if you spend your days playing a persona
and hiding who you truly are you will
end up at a place in life
not only that you don’t want to be but
that you didn’t
even mean to get to the persona
is incapable of receiving love
it can only receive praise if you’re
hiding who you truly are
all the success and popularity
in the world will feel hollow
because people aren’t in love with you
they’re just applauding the role you
play
we don’t love russell crowe we love
gladiator
we don’t love chris hemsworth we love
thor
this is how you can feel alone in a
crowd
and hollow in victory i’ve stood on the
door of more than a thousand club nights
and watched a million people go into
them and i can promise you that
even in a crowd of thousands you will
never feel connected
if you’re only playing a role if we want
to have confident faith in ourselves
and love who we truly are we cannot
pretend
to be someone we’re not this doesn’t
mean that we can’t become better
or develop this worldview is entirely
compatible
with a desire for growth and
self-improvement
but the goal is to become the best
version of you
not your version of someone else
your life is your story to write
you are the protagonist the narrator
illustrator
and author and yet
we waste our pages by looking over other
people’s shoulders
to plagiarize a tale that isn’t
even our own salvador dali
is one of my favorite weirdos from the
mustache to the dress ends to the
time he nearly died while giving a
seminar because he arrived in a
malfunctioning deep-sea diving
suit not to be wrenched out of it
mid-talk
if dali hadn’t embraced his weirdness
and created his work the world would
have
never received it as brilliant as he was
da vinci didn’t do dali
and michelangelo didn’t do dali
anything other than the absolute truest
manifestation of dali’s being
would have left the world fundamentally
less
this is the imperative we all have
it is your duty to give the world what
only you can give it
because only you can
remember this number
the chances of you existing are
basically
zero your presence is
a unique miracle if you
don’t paint your darli
no one else will this
makes the act of embracing your
weirdness compulsory you have an
obligation to the universe to do it
during your brief highly unlikely time
awake
in between two eternities of sleep you
have something
to offer the universe in your experience
and your creativity
that no one else has to offer in exactly
that way
which means that if you don’t if you
allow
status games or social norms or internal
fears
to curb your weirdness the universe
will be fundamentally less complex
and beautiful so
learn to be open and honest with your
friends
have the courage to say what’s on your
mind
find people who you can genuinely be
yourself around
and know that your weird input
could be the words which change someone
else’s life
or make them fall in love with you
and if the recipient turns and looks at
you
with wide-eyed shock indifferent
blankness or a
mocking sneer remember that this doesn’t
spell
doom for you and your miraculous genes
it simply means that you haven’t yet
found someone
who is quite your kind
of weird thank you
you