Our natural upbringing and societal algorithm both guide us to join the crowd, stay with it, and keep moving forward with it.
This happens because we humans are social animals. We feel safe in a crowd.
However, our societal system also pays rich dividends to those who stand away from the crowd, find success, and in the process build new safety nets for others.
The hardest part is initially moving away from the crowd. When you first start doing so, you’ll encounter strong resistance. Unseen forces will “magnetically” pull you back into the crowd. You’ll face a hard fight against that resistance.
The attraction of this powerful magnet (the crowd) will keep pulling you back. You yourself will even fail to understand if it is an inward pull or an outward resistance.
But once you escape that magnetic zone, you’ll be freed from the pull—and the crowd.
When you’re free from that orbit, and stand as an “outlier,” even the smallest of your successes will get noticed and attract attention.
As a successful outlier, you then become a magnet that attracts others.
The more successful you become, the more of the crowd you will attract.
When we want to move out and away from the crowd, our society puts up resistance. However, society also provides higher significance and multiple-fold value when an outlier succeeds by ejecting away from the crowd.
It’s a societal paradox that is less acknowledged than its prevalence—a commonness less understood.