I’ve been captivated by an idea this past week.
“Embrace your funk,” Graham Duncan writes. In other words, put your quirk — your essential weirdness, the thing you do because you just can’t help it — at the very center of your work.
Don’t bring it along as a nice-to-have. Be known for it.
Bold advice — and not easy to follow. Perhaps you’re not aware of that thing, since it comes naturally as breathing. Perhaps you’re not confident in it, since you don’t know how you do what you do. Perhaps you’re afraid or ashamed of it, since it’s somehow not the regular kind.
But the regular kind is a commodity, and commodity profits get competed away.
Virgin Airways might not be for everyone, but it sure isn’t Delta or American.
In the long run, it’s much easier and more successful to be yourself: once your people spot one of their own, the choice is clear.
Colin Steele 