‘Have you seen the latest blockbuster film?
That’s a question that goes round every office workplace or friends group every week. It might be the latest big Hollywood movie or the hot drama show drawing in the viewers on TV. It’s a leading question that most fall for.
If films or TV series aren’t your thing and you respond, ‘No, not seen it…and probably won’t’, you will be met with shocked looks and the classic retort, ‘You HAVEN’T seen? Everyone has watched it!’. Not everyone, you haven’t. You have become one of the people who don’t do things. Things that everyone else does because, well, everyone else, is too.
Now, that’s a challenge because us humans are tribal. It all began in our prehistoric times. With few human beings on the planet then survival depended on joint efforts. As a group they combined together to catch food, stay safe, form relationships, forge unity, and procreate. That ethic was forged into their mentality – the lone person is at risk, unsupported, out on their own, and their future is grim.
The backdrop has changed (there are no T-Rex’s roaming outside or woolly Mammoth’s to snare for dinner), but the principal remains to this day both mentally and emotionally. Be part of the group, or be exiled as a outcast never to be able to return, talked about and ridiculed. Which is why centuries later we all go to the same hit movie because everyone else is just like we all wore sabre tooth jewellery back in Neanderthal days as they were cool and popular. Our psychology is still prehistoric. We want to fit it, we want to be part of the tribe.
The Road Less Travelled.
Poet Robert Frost in his epic work, The Road Not Taken’, wrote the immortal lines, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference’. His poem is an allegory – the road is our lives and which route we choose to go ‘when we can’t see the wood for the trees’, i.e. the way ahead is not clear. Most do not take the road less travelled. The tribe walks the other path.
But Steve Jobs did in his thinking and design for the I-Phone. Dick Fosbury did in his jumping style in the high jump. Clarice Cliff did in her brand of art deco styled ceramics. And Pablo Picasso certainly did in his surreal art. They and many other outliers and renegades were people who DIDN’T do things others did. They never cared about mammoth hair as a fashion statement or T-Rex claws to eat their meals with. And they wouldn’t be in the cinema line to find out what the fuss is about at the movies or catching every episode of TV’s big ratings buster just so they can be part of the chat over the watercooler.
They are people who don’t do things others do, they do things they do. Backing that up they think how they do, see what they see, believe what they believe, and choose roads other don’t. It makes them happily individual in a tribe of one. If you look at most truly stand out people who have made and left a mark on this world, that’s what they have done too. They did only themselves. And that led to a blockbuster life that could be a movie itself!
How is it time in your life that you didn’t do what others do?