weirdness

January 2023

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” (Hunter S. Thompson)

Life rewards weirdness. A lot of people don’t get this because traditional education teaches the opposite: conform by studying the same things as everyone else, chase similar goals, and try to fit into moulds.

But life is much more fun and productive once you embrace your funk and treat everything as a form of self-expression.

Your weirdness is your edge. It’s the secret sauce to having a career that you enjoy and are wildly successful at. In the internet age, you can monopolise any niche. Combine your vocation and avocation.

As Naval says, “what you really want to do is just figure out what you are uniquely the best in the world at because you love it. And then find out who or what needs that the most.”

When people think markets are saturated, they’re trying to compete in other peoples’ games. The internet has an infinite long tail. Rather than looking where other people are playing, take what you love and keep narrowing it down until you find greenfield space that you can own.

Tim Ferriss talks about getting into podcasting back in 2014 and being told that he was late to the party. “There’s always room for quality,” so he carved out a niche by focusing on long-form interviews with high performers in diverse fields. Now, he’s got one of the biggest podcasts in the world.

People deprive themselves of building a career around their interests because they think they’re trivial. Better to follow some conventional track that strangers won’t raise their eyebrows to. I once asked a guy I knew why he was sticking it out in his role when he disliked it so much. He told me because of the “cache.” Over time, this is going to fade out.

Doing what everyone else is doing feels safe in the short-term. But it’s actually the most risky: these paths are competitive and eventually get commoditised. In a global labour market, you want to be a one-of-one. At some point, you have to diverge.

Embracing your weirdness makes you a magnet for like-minded people. You attract what you put out in the world. To find friends you vibe with, you have to generate signals. And the internet is the best way to do that because it’s a serendipity machine. If you’re always pretending to be someone else, you won’t ever find genuine connections.

Even if your interests are so fringe that only 1 in 10,000 people share them, that’s still hundreds of thousands of potential friends. You only need to find a handful of them. Our minds aren’t evolved to grok the scale of the internet. Friends used to be a product of where we grew up, which made it quite a lottery. My dad still has the same buddies from when he was 6 years old because most of them have never left the same few square miles. With the internet, we can have decentralised friendships.

When you decide to go deep on your weirdness, it creates some friction. People around you won’t understand what you’re doing. That’s okay - they don’t have to. I want to spend my free time reading, writing, building, and going on walks. I want to have certain kinds of conversations. You have to leave some people behind to be true to yourself.