How to Succeed in Business When You Look - or Think - Differently Than Everyone Else

Chris Brogan never fit in. “I spent my entire life feeling like I didn’t belong,” says the author and speaker. “Customer service was where I started (in a big phone company) and ever since, I’ve seen that most companies are built around training replicable cogs to deliver replicable service with ZERO space for passion and deep quality of service.” That cubicle-fueled homogeneity may be great for turning out assembly line hamburgers or sprockets, but it’s deadly for the innovation and creativity that fuels many of the business world’s greatest triumphs.

In his new book The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth: Entrepreneurship for Weirdos, Misfits, and World Dominators, Brogan says that difference and individuality may be the new secret to success: “I learned [that] when I saw how much money and success I had when I spoke in my own language, delivered value with my own methods, and found the people who resonated with my ideas.”  The term ‘freak’ may have been pejorative in the past, but Brogan says it’s time to reclaim it. (Click to tweet.) “Very much like the gay community reclaimed ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ to be badges of pride,” he says, “I think that the differently-minded types and the overly passionate types have been marginalized. I’ve been pushed to ‘fit in’ for years, and yet, all my success has come from being my own overly passionate self.”

It might seem unlikely that a thriving business could spring from a “freakish” passion – for punk music or beer or yoga. But Brogan begs to differ. “Most of the economy has geared itself around mass selling to mass audiences,” he says. “No one’s ever loved this experience, not even when Ford offered us ‘any color, as long as it’s black.’ Now we have the chance to get what we want. This isn’t mass ‘customization.’ It’s personalization and it’s small batch artisan-minded business. But not relegated to homemade soap. This can be accounting. It can be doctoring. It can be watchmaking.Shinola in Detroit [a purveyor of American-made watches, bicycles, and more] is a freak business, if ever I’ve seen one.”

But being a freak isn’t license to eschew anything and everything mainstream, says Brogan: systems matter. “There’s a strange paradox,” he says. “I’m saying with this book, ‘don’t conform,’ but I’m not saying ‘just be a crazy chaos system.’ Life doesn’t happen in the roaring ocean, which is far too turbulent. It doesn’t happen in the puddles, which don’t have enough movement. You need that line/edge of chaos and order. Systems are vital to success.  Only with freaks, we have to create our own systems, that work for us. Or hack what’s out there. (Click to tweet.) So much money is to be made in this one facet.”

One system that Brogan – an early blogger – has mastered is social media. “People have long mislabled me as a social media guy,” he says. “I’m not. I’m a freak who uses social media because it’s a channel that no one else controls. I can gather my own crowd. I can give myself permission to launch a magazine, a TV show, a radio show. I don’t need ratings. I just gather community. I’m a regular Forbes reader, but I also read hundreds of blogs that aren’t part of the mainstream.”

Of course, ‘flying your freak flag’ can lead to great success if the world, or at least a subset of it, embraces your vision. But oftentimes it ends in failure – and Brogan’s OK with that. “I believe that most entrepreneurial pursuits should be 30-40% failure-fueled or more,” he says. It’s simply a step along the path.

Indeed, he says, a tolerance for failure may be what differentiates the truly successful. “Every single huge success in life has mountains of failure behind it. And precious few people develop the taste for failure. Those extreme few? They’re your bosses or the people you wish you could be. Why not be that for yourself?”

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out, and you can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.