“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”
― Vincent van Gogh
Too many people spend their time seeking normality and the false security it provides. In reality, normality is a front – it makes you think you are safe, while providing no safety net at all. For when you need a safety net, normality will leave you there unprepared and inexperienced to change direction, take the other fork in the road, challenge the status quo, or make change happen.
Normality will leave you unprepared to handle the unexpected, normality is based on things changing slightly in a world that looks significantly the same.
Embrace being the exception, embrace the nontraditional, eccentric, and unconventional. This isn’t a call to be different for the sake of being different. It is a call to to look at things differently, assume changes are coming that don’t fit the current paradigm, and to embrace the joy of not knowing.
You don’t know the future, nobody does. A lot of people guess and some get it right. The greatest, the real successes, know they don’t know and are constantly building and preparing for different outcomes that take things in different directions.
Fundamentally, this is what we need to teach ourselves and our children. It is this ability to think, more than a specific skill: STEM, English, Art, Music, etc. that will separate the winners and losers. Building diverse skill-sets is more important now (and will be in the future) than a specific skill, because you can’t possibly know what you will need to know in five years let alone twenty.
