I was explaining to a client that doing something differently is often the best way to do it. While most people try like hell to conform to those around them, those who are daring enough, courageous enough, and wise enough to zig while everyone else is zagging will likely be appreciated, adored, and remembered.
It’s been one of the primary tenets of my life.
If everyone else is doing it, I will try to do it differently.
Or I’ll do something else entirely.
The story I offered my client — amongst the hundreds of stories I could have told — was this:
When I was 22 years old, I went on a first date with a woman named Christine, who I had thought was definitely out of my league. Nevertheless, I asked her out, and to my surprise, she said yes.
Given her beauty, sense of humor, and intelligence, I suspected that she had been on many dates, so I decided that my date would need to be different.
None of the usual trappings of a traditional first date.
So I brought her to Stop & Shop, and we proceeded to go shopping. I wasn’t really shopping for groceries — I was living in the pantry with a goat at the time and did not need to purchase groceries — but I knew three things:
- No one had ever taken this woman to Stop & Shop on a date before
- The aisles of a grocery store are lined with thousands of items, and many would prompt me to crack jokes, tell funny stories, and ask her lots of questions about herself.
- Good or bad, this date would be unforgettable.
Christine and I spent two hours going up and down the aisles at Stop & Shop, loading a cart with an array of random items. We talked. I told funny stories about bologna, elbow macaroni, and Little Debbie snack cakes. I brought the characters in the cereal aisle to life. We scraped the frost off the sides of open freezers and had a tiny snowball fight. We turned the advertising slogan “Leggo my Eggo” into a sexual reference.
When we finished our trip up and down every aisle of the store, I removed and purchased two things from the cart:
A can of vanilla frosting and a bottles of Coke.
Then we went into the parking lot, climbed onto the hood of my car, and ate the frosting from the can with a spoon I had brought for just that occasion and shared the soda.
Later, we kissed for the first time on the hood of my car under the yellow sodium-vapor lights of the parking lot.
Christine later told me it was the best date of her life. She worried that no date would ever compare.
It was a date I will never forget.
Thirty years later, I suspect that Christine remembers it, too.
Christine and I dated for a few months before breaking up. The craziness of my life at the time — sharing a pantry with a goat in the pantry of a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, working 16 hours a day at a bank and a McDonald’s to save enough money to pay a lawyer for my upcoming trial, and a violent robbery that left me with a lifetime of PTSD — was too much for a relationship to bear.
Christine was a college student. I was barely holding on.
She deserved more.
But it was one of those relationships I look back upon with great fondness, and it began in the aisles of a grocery store, with me telling stories about cream of mushroom soup, playing catch with oranges, and placing a note on the lobster tank that read, “Save us!”
I dared to be different, and though there was a chance it would not be appreciated, that almost never happens.
Steve Jobs wrote:
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things…”
I told my client to be different.
Do things differently.
Stop trying to conform to the people around her.
Choose to be unforgettable.
Easier said than done, I know. Different is hard. It’s often scary. It can feel dangerous.
But as I’ve often said, “The hard thing and the right thing are often the same thing.”
