He spent afternoons on his high school athletic fields pretending to be Prism, battling villains like Magneto, “running and diving and trying to dodge magnetic blasts.” Students called him freak and weirdo and isolated him. Bullies threw rocks at him. “Kids thought that was really strange. And it is, okay? I know that I’m weird and I’m the first to admit it. But that’s what I loved to do,” Prinze said. “Instead of getting pissed off, I tried to hone my skills, so eventually one day people would understand what I was doing.”
Now they understand the actor, who had a recurring role on the final season of 24. As the Los Angeles Times observed, “The quirks that made him a misfit at school bring him fame and fortune in Hollywood.” In school, people thought Prinze was odd because he was quiet and sensitive, and they made fun of him for creating plays for girls in his class. As an actor, Prinze exhibits what one journalist called a “vulnerable humanity.” Director Darren Stein dubbed him “a male Julia Roberts, the kind of actor that projects the inner self and makes a character glow.” She’s All That costar Rachel Leigh Cook said, “He’s just an incredibly natural actor, and by far the nicest guy in the business. That’s said about a lot of people, but it’s actually true about Freddie.”
“Back then I was considered weird and a freak, and now I’m considered artistic and an actor, and I do the exact same thing that I was doing back then. . . . People think I’m cool now for the reasons they thought I was strange when I was a kid. I am absolutely committed to my imagination,” Prinze has said. “I look at it like this: I sit back and watch. My whole life, I’ve always been on the outside looking in, I’ve never fit in, and I love it like that.”
AUTHENTICITY, SELF-AWARENESS
Former United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld once said, “The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. And only those who listen can speak.” Self-awareness is an authenticity of being. It is a commitment to the values and philosophies that you have already figured out are important to your individual identity. It is an understanding of what will make you happy, successful, respected, or valued. In school, cafeteria fringe may not yet know precisely who they are, but at least they are more true to themselves than the students who conform to the in crowd. Self-awareness, wrote Stephen Covey in the best-selling The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “enables us to stand apart and examine even the way we ‘see’ ourselves. . . . It affects not only our attitudes and behaviors but also how we see other people. It becomes our map of the basic nature of mankind.”
In the business world, people who live their lives according to their core values tend to have strong brands with devoted followings. Craigslist, which is worth more than $5 billion, succeeds because of its down-to-earth “nerd values,” wrote founder Craig Newmark, who “grew up wearing a plastic pocket protector and thick, black glasses, taped together, the full nerd cliché.” Ben and Jerry, of the eponymous ice-cream brand, have said that they became successful because, although they didn’t always know what they were doing, they knew why they were doing it. They view the company as a values-led business that promotes “social progress for the common good: advocating for the many people in our society whose needs are not served by the status quo; giving a voice to the people who normally aren’t heard.” (Ben and Jerry, who met in school as shy boys and the two slowest students in gym class, are also known for their creative marketing and business policies.)
Certainly one need not be a leader to be successful, admired, or respected in adulthood, but it’s worth mentioning that self-awareness is extolled by many management experts. In The 108 Skills of Natural Born Leaders, University of Houston management professor Warren Blank listed self-awareness as number one. “Self-awareness is fundamental to leadership growth,” Blank wrote. Self-aware people “know their strengths, weaknesses, and assumptions. They understand their motives and recognize what deserves attention. . . . Master leaders also know how to demonstrate strong emotions.”
Fall Out Boy, the multiplatinum, Grammy-nominated punk-pop band that has been called “the kings of emo,” is famous for expressing emotions authentically. As one magazine observed, “an entire generation hears its own experiences described in the genre’s diaristic lyrics about tortured romances and crippling self-doubt, and it prizes these scars like priceless jewels. Emo bands don’t merely wear their heart on their sleeve—they lift up their sleeve to show the bloody wounds underneath.” Frontman Pete Wentz, the bassist and lyricist famous as much for his guyliner (male eyeliner) as for his outspokenness, has called his music “a giant pop-culture idea, but it’s still weird and different.”
Wentz, who once dyed his hair blue, can relate. In high school, although he was a talented soccer player, he was also an emo, “a solitary guy. I was definitely into invisible friends and making up stories,” he has said. “I was pretty outcast, but a lot of it was by choice. I was kind of a geek. . . . I looked weird.” He has been open about his depression and stints in therapy.
Today, Fall Out Boy, as one reviewer put it, is known for “Wentz’s deeply personal, introspective lyrics about self-doubt and self-loathing.” (It is also known for its long song titles, such as “Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued” and “I Slept with Someone in Fall Out Boy and All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written about Me.”) The band is “equal parts protector and patron saint of misfit underdogs,” said another reviewer. By listening to the voice within him and sharing it unabashedly, Wentz has led Fall Out Boy to become not just a band, but, as Jay-Z called it, a movement. “People don’t realize it’s okay to feel down and sad sometimes. It is part of the cycle of feeling okay,” Wentz has said. “There is an honesty in our music and I think people appreciate it. . . . We have always written what we are really feeling.”
Wentz has created many outlets for what has been called his “confessional bravado.” He wrote a comic book series based on Fall Out Boy’s music, developed a clothing line, hosted a radio show, exhibited his own mixed-media art, and founded a record label for which he discovered bands like Gym Class Heroes and Panic! At the Disco, whose first record went platinum. VH1 named Wentz, a dedicated activist who was UNICEF’s 2010 Tap Project national spokesperson, one of its “Top 20 Celebs Gone Good.”
“I’m happy to be part of a culture where the guys who were made fun of in high school are now the ones the jocks go to see onstage,” Wentz said. “I like the idea that everyone can get depressed and that there is a way to get through it.”
INTEGRITY, CANDOR
If self-awareness and authenticity refer to being true to oneself, then integrity and candor refer to being honest in the ways one lives and interacts with others. Individuals with integrity earn people’s trust because they consistently adhere to a code of ethical values, making good on promises and fulfilling expectations. Integrity is not the province of someone who engages in gossip or other relational aggressions, or who attempts to influence people by manipulating them. “Integrity also means avoiding any communication that is deceptive, full of guile, or beneath the dignity of people,” according to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. “One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present. In doing so, we build the trust of those who are present.”
Candor expresses in language what integrity embodies in spirit. Honest interaction is valued not only in personal relationships—it’s also good for business. “Lack of candor basically blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got,” Jack Welch wrote. “Candor gets more people in the conversation and when you get more people in the conversation, to state the obvious, you get idea rich. By that I mean many more ideas get surfaced, discussed, pulled apart, and improved. Instead of everyone shutting down, everyone opens up and learns. . . . That approach—surface, debate, improve, decide—isn’t just an advantage, it’s a necessity in a global marketplace.”
Gra
mmy-winning country/pop superstar Taylor Swift is known for her candor. She writes her own material that describes real people, often by name. When the Jonas Brothers’ Joe Jonas broke up with her in a twenty-seven-second phone call, for example, she wrote a song about it. She is beloved because, as one reviewer observed, “She listens to her heart, and it beats to the tune of teen angst, love lost and found, hurt feelings, and life being wonderful and unfair at the same time. . . . Her lyrics connect with the young and young at heart who understand those feelings. That gives her street cred, makes her believable far beyond most other older tunesmiths trying to write for teens.”
Often her message is about how, while it’s easier to conform to the crowd, being different makes people extraordinary. “The farther away you get from middle school, junior high, the more you realize that,” Swift has said. “In the real world, if you have something about yourself that’s different, you’re lucky. It’s not a curse.”
Swift speaks from experience. In school, she was an outsider who “became a people-watcher when I lost all my friends.” When she sat down at a lunch table, girls would get up and move to a different table. Why? “The kids at school thought it was weird that I liked country [music]. They’d make fun of me,” she told Teen Vogue. Her clique cast her out because “in middle school there really doesn’t have to be that much reason for people to not like you. Maybe it’s because your hair is frizzy . . . or maybe it’s because instead of getting drunk and going to parties on the weekends when you’re thirteen, you write songs and play at coffeehouses.”
Besides the obvious way in which being excluded because of her devotion to music exemplifies quirk theory, Swift has also attributed her success to the experience of being alienated by classmates. “It was so healthy for me to go through that rejection. Because I wouldn’t be able to look at people and read a situation if I hadn’t developed that skill when I was twelve,” she said. “Looking back . . . I wouldn’t have changed anything. If I had been popular, I would have been perfectly content with staying where I was.”
In ninth grade, Swift moved to Nashville, earned a record deal, and at fourteen, became the youngest person that Sony/ATV Publishing had ever signed as a professional staff songwriter. When, a year into her career, she returned to her hometown, the girls who had shunned her “showed up, wearing my T-shirts and asking me to sign their CDs. It was bittersweet, because it made me realize that they didn’t remember being mean to me and that I needed to forget about it too,” Swift said. “Really, if I hadn’t come home from school miserable every day, maybe I wouldn’t have been so motivated to write songs. I should probably thank them!”
In 2008 and 2009, Taylor Swift sold more albums than any other musician or band in the world. In 2010 she became the top-selling digital artist in music history. As she told an audience at a concert in Nebraska, “What does it matter if you didn’t have any friends in high school when you’ve got 15,000 of your closest friends coming to see you in Omaha?”
CURIOSITY, LOVE OF LEARNING, PASSION
When Yahoo! executives evaluate job candidates, they look for what the company calls the Y-Gene, described as a quality of people who “marvel at life and milk it for all it’s worth. They’re curious and energetic. They value openness and want to live unbridled and unrestricted. They appreciate that life is huge. They don’t settle for the status quo—they want to grow.”
Such qualities represent a zest for learning, for continually expanding the boundaries of one’s knowledge and abilities. This ardor can manifest as unbridled emotion (as Noah felt toward the band) or as quiet devotion (as Eli felt about geography), as a curiosity that borders on skepticism (Danielle), or as a youthful enthusiasm (Regan). In a book about bridging the old economy with the new, London Business School professor Gary Hamel, whom the Wall Street Journal ranked as the number one most influential business thinker in the world, wrote, “You must marry a thorough understanding of business concept innovation with the wide-eyed curiosity of a precocious five-year-old. Phrases such as ‘disciplined imagination,’ ‘routine creativity,’ and ‘informed intuition’ capture the challenge. . . . Imagination, creativity, and intuition [have] been bred out of you—first by school, then by work. Yet you can, and must, regain your lost curiosity. You must learn to see again with eyes undimmed by precedent.”
When you do, both work and life can be informed by an outlook born from mastering something you love. When Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, was in school, he was a loner and a “misfit” who subsequently looked to the outdoors for entertainment. To band eagles and falcons for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, he learned how to rappel down cliffs, which sparked a lifetime love of rock climbing; he has since climbed mountains on every continent and has been called “the godfather of ice climbing in this country.” A craftsman at heart, Chouinard developed his own climbing equipment and, eventually, the outdoor clothing and gear company Patagonia.
Patagonia’s most widely acclaimed policies stem directly from Chouinard’s passion for the environment. One of the first green companies, Patagonia annually gives 1 percent of its sales to environmental causes and makes all products from recycled or recyclable fibers. The company has worked with larger companies like Walmart, Nike, and Gap to help them become more eco-friendly. Every year, forty employees take paid two-month internships with environmental groups. Solar panels power one company building, and a recent extension was built using 95 percent recyclable materials. The employees with the most fuel-efficient cars are given the best parking spots. The company was one of the first to offer on-site child care and now hosts lunchtime yoga and Pilates sessions and occasional fly-fishing classes. Employees work flexible hours, often taking two-hour surfing jaunts or bike rides in the middle of the workday. Patagonia covers 100 percent of health premiums for all employees, including part-time workers. In his autobiography, Chouinard wrote, “Only those businesses operating with a sense of urgency . . . constantly evolving, open to diversity and new ways of doing things, are going to be here 100 years from now.”
In 2007, Fortune ran a cover photo of Chouinard and called his company “the coolest company on the planet.”
COURAGE
It is well-documented that courage is one of the most admired characteristics across the world. For their book Character Strengths and Virtues, psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman studied various religions and attitudes in more than seventy countries, in order to develop a shortlist of “those abiding moral traits that everyone values” and the practice of which could bring about personal happiness or “the good life.” Courage emerged as such a universally cherished characteristic that the authors highlighted it as one of six core virtues (the others were wisdom, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence). Courage “has an inner life as well as an outer one,” the psychologists concluded. “Courage is composed of not just observable acts but also the cognitions, emotions, motivations, and decisions that bring them about. . . . We mean courage to include . . . any act of willfully overcoming into what it is so easy to slip: security, comfort, complacency. We mean doing what is right, even when one has much to lose.”
Less about reckless behavior than strength of character, this kind of bravery includes standing up to or departing from group thinking, venturing into the unfamiliar, and making unpopular choices. As discussed earlier, courage is ever present among nonconformists. It is an emblem that, whether they know it or not, all cafeteria fringe wear by virtue of both the individualism that made them cafeteria fringe and the will to endure the exclusion as they continue to stay true to themselves.
Creativity. Freethinking. Resilience. Authenticity. Candor. Courage. None of these characteristics typically marks the collective popular crowd in schools. This is not to say that populars don’t possess these characteristics, or that their own set of qualities, like negotiation skills and savvy, won’t benefit them in the future. But they are perhaps less likely to exhibit them than, say, the geek, loner, punk, floater,
freak, nerd, rebel, or outsider. If a student is marginalized at school, he likely already possesses at least a few of these traits. In the quest to have a satisfying post-school life that earns respect and appreciation, therefore, the cafeteria fringe are already ahead of the game.
Although the inner qualities that lead a student to be excluded or that inform his reaction to being excluded may carry over into adulthood, the exterior label doesn’t have to. While scientists, doctors, writers, entrepreneurs, and various other professionals represent quirk theory, in this chapter I have focused mostly on celebrities to illustrate that popularity in adulthood is based on different factors than popularity in school. Consider this abridged list of celebrities who told the media they were excluded in school:
Judd Apatow, director, producer, screenwriter (Superbad, Knocked Up, Freaks and Geeks): “I think that everything I do tends to root for the underdog. I always felt as a kid that I was under-appreciated, invisible, or weird, but I’ve always secretly thought people would one day appreciate what is different about me. I’m always putting that message out there. Eventually the nerds and the geeks will have their day.”
Actress Angelina Jolie: At school, “I was the punk outsider,” she has said. “I used to cut myself or jump out of airplanes, trying to find something new to push up against because sometimes everything else felt too easy. I was searching for something deeper, something more. I tried everything. I always felt caged, closed in, like I was punching at things that weren’t there. I always had too much energy for the room I was in.” In adulthood, Jolie has channeled that energy into her award-winning humanitarianism efforts.
The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School Page 19