The experiences we remember, the moments we talk about, the ideas that spread, they are all peculiar in some way.

And yet we’ve been taught that being peculiar is scary and dangerous. How can that be?

The case for peculiar

If those experiences and moments and ideas weren’t peculiar; if they were the average kind, any-old-thing, fungible with all the other moments, experiences and ideas; then we wouldn’t talk about them, we wouldn’t remember them. They wouldn’t spread. They wouldn’t win.

And when you want your business to stand out, when you want your products to spread, your service to be the one people are enthusiastically supporting then you need to stand out. Then you need to be peculiar, to be worthy of being remarked upon.

And that can be scary because it’s a bell-curve. Good-peculiar on the right, the winners, that everyone talks about. Most people in the middle, safely invisible. And on the left, on the other side of the bell-curve, the kind of peculiar that got ridiculed.

Ridicule

In the industrial system we grew up in, the people who were peculiar were mocked and ridiculed. They were teased for being different and we learnt that being peculiar was dangerous.

The industrial system we grew up in was about fitting in, not standing out. The industrial system needed you to be the same as everybody else because the industrial system was built on efficiency, on mass production. Make them the same, and make them cheaper, so that we can make ever more of them.

The System Is Dying

But the industrial system is coming to an end. Eventually everyone has access to the same equipment, and the same materials, and they make the same products.

And the customers, the customers have figured that out, and so the customers just want the cheapest one, because they’re all the same anyway. And eventually it’s not possible to make them any cheaper. The industrial system that taught us that being peculiar is dying. The gigs up. The game’s over.

And so now, now we need to develop the courage to be peculiar again, to be remarkable, because in the experience economy, peculiar is where the winners are.