Issue 4. You say you want ‘misfits’…

Hello! Welcome to the latest Six Things Impossible newsletter and oh my WOW it’s good to be back. This instalment, I hope, will deliver you a dose of fun and happiness, because that’s what you deserve. 

The theme of this issue is weirdness. Well, perceived weirdness. 

It’s weird, isn’t it, when you think about weird. It’s obvious the word was created in order to ‘other’. You’re weird. That’s weird. To describe something we can’t grasp, or perhaps don’t even want to understand; like a phenomenon, or a vision, or a character. 

I’ve been called weird a lot in my life, and I’d wager 99% of the time it wasn’t in a good way. It’s not that I run through the streets dressed as a fish shouting “wibble wobble” or only talk in riddles (although that would be cool), I guess… I just… am not normal. 

But this is the problem, what the hell is normal? 

In reality, what each society considers to be ‘normal’ is based upon a series of traditional constructs and rules which are, for the most part, fiction. And often boring. Every rule was invented, every norm manufactured and every expectation groomed. 

What one hundred years ago were ‘norms’ relating to sexuality, our brains, and the role of women and people of colour in culture are not norms today. And if you want an amazing quick read, check out this list of things that used to be illegal and aren’t anymore, including beard tax.

So it’s weird the word weird prevails. In this newsletter I’m going to explore how we deal with the not normal, how secretly we all love a touch of weird and maybe… even imagine a society where weirdness wins. Come join me! 

1. Be your best self, as long as your best self looks, talks and acts like me. 

“We want misfits. Outsiders. The crazy ones!”

Lifted from a popular Steve Jobs quote, I’ve seen this statement in recruitment ads and LinkedIn job application requests for years. 

“I’m expanding my team! I want misfits. Outsiders. The crazy ones!” Particularly with advertising companies and particularly for strategy teams. 

“We want misfits!” 

There’s rarely an elaboration on precisely what that entails. It doesn’t sit right with me. A misfit, according to the dictionary is: “someone who is not suited to a situation or who is not accepted by other people because their behaviour is strange or unusual.” It’s someone who doesn’t fit in. 

“We want misfits!” 

It’s a fun thing to say, eh? It’s also an excellent way to brand your organisation. If you have ‘misfits’, you probably think out the box, off the wall, unlike anybody else. But when you say you want misfits, what do you really want? 

Steve Jobs was a very specific brand of misfit, by all accounts. In the excellent Creativity Inc, by Ed Catmull - president of Pixar Animation and Jobs’ former colleague - the Apple CEO is described as: 

“brilliant and inspirational, capable of diving deeply and intelligently into any problem we faced. But he could also be impossible: dismissive, condescending, threatening, even bullying. Perhaps of most concern, from a management standpoint, was the fact that he exhibited so little empathy, He was simply unable to put himself into other people’s shoes, and his sense of humour was non-existent.” 

I don’t think anyone would actively seek bullies with no empathy to sit in their strategy team, regardless of how brilliant they are? Right? RIGHT?

When I think of me, as an oddball (I’m a poet, we have to be strange) and I think of my experiences, I wonder what it requires to nurture an environment that’s not only accepting of, but welcoming towards “outsiders.” 

As a head of innovation (the job I’ve done most!) you automatically feel an outsider… I was brought into projects to be weird. But no one else is trained to deal with the new stuff you want to them to try, and people are rarely equipped to manage the change you want to inspire. You’re an outsider… and outside is normally where you stay. Otherwise, entire businesses would be filled with innovators! 

If you want ‘misfits’ - male and female - you need to be set up to have and grow new ideas. You need to teach people how to listen and build on unusual concepts. You need to embrace social difference and think about how meetings, processes, work hours, phone calls, client relationships, allow for the kind of ‘misfit’ mentality you say you want. 

If you want misfits, nothing about your company or team should be normal. 

But modern workplaces - especially in the ad industry - aren’t built for outsiders. They’re built for norms. Increasingly this request for “misfits. Outsiders. The crazy ones!” feels inappropriate. Flippant.

The world of work still has a long way to go when it comes to accommodating every thought and every brain. True neurodiversity is an opportunity for businesses.

This year I was lucky to meet a woman called Sarah Cometa. 

She was a participant on my Practice Makes UnPerfect course. Practice Makes UnPerfect is a 6-week course, 2 hours a week, that helps women finesse their public voices. During the course we role play thought-leadership, writing, interviews and presenting. It’s a hard slog, but the point is to bring out the best in every woman (rather than getting them to act like someone else) and it works every time. 

Sarah Cometa is a brilliant, smart, witty sales engineer with the kind of presence that makes her born for public speaking. She wrote this article about “coming out” (her words) with ADHD at work, and the nervousness involved. 

She talked about how supportive her colleagues were, but also the constant worry that she couldn't live up to a (fictional) ‘professional ideal’ the business world has forged over time. She struggles with timelines, often gets lost in thought, and “does the hard stuff well and the easy stuff badly!” In her article, Cometa said: 

“Neurodiverse people at work still face significant stigma and problems “fitting in” – that is if they manage to pass a recruitment process that is built to exclude them. It’s estimated that 15% of the population of the United Kingdom is neurodivergent, and a similar figure could be assumed for the United States. However, many people experiencing neurodivergence are unemployed — far higher than the national average — with some figures putting unemployment rates for neurodivergent people at 80%.” 

This is a serious issue. Why are we still aiming for fictional professional norms, whilst at the same time declaring the hiring of people with slight personality quirks an act of bravery. (Which is normally what people mean when they say ‘misfits’… and mostly men with personality quirks, at that). 

Neurodiversity is something businesses need to understand. But really understand. Think about ADHD, autism, dyspraxia, hypersensitivity and Tourette’s. Think about where and how you’ve been schooled on these conditions and how that schooling may be flawed. Think about what your own company has in place to both hire and support neurodivergent individuals. Do you have anything in place?

I wonder what people were thinking when they loudly, proudly said they wanted “misfits. Outsiders. The crazy ones!” Were they thinking about simply thinking differently? 

Were they thinking about brains? Were they thinking about personalities? Were they thinking about norms? Were they thinking about the professional ideals their own business facilitates? Were they thinking about the claustrophobic impact of othering language and ill-informed stereotypes? Maybe they weren’t thinking at all. 

2. I was nice to the weird girl! 

Wholesome content coming your way in:

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My favourite trend of this year, on TikTok, has nothing to do with dancing, feta pasta or lip-syncing to Gemma Collins. The ‘weird girl’ trend on TikTok makes my heart glow and the butterflies in my stomach bounce. If butterflies could bounce. I don’t think they can. 

2021 will be the year of feelgood content. 2021 is the year of the antidote. We don’t need brands telling us to be meaningful or change the world. In 2021 brands need to know their place, and that place is one of entertainment, please. 

But back to TikTok, the platform every senior ad man loves to hate. When you’re a kid, being called ‘weird’ is a social catastrophe. It makes me sad that children start their school lives beautifully odd and curious, and the weird gets dragged out of them like a friendly yet ultimately socially unacceptable poltergeist. 

The format for the ‘weird girl’ trend is simple. With How To Safe A Life by The Fray playing in the background, someone looks to camera and says: “When you were nice to the weird girl and she’s been your gf for 6 years.” The camera then pans to the girlfriend, in the background doing a strange dance or impression of an elephant or eating a fistful of chips. Like this. 

A love story for our modern era. It’s celebratory. It’s spotlighting the charm and humour of women. It’s WHOLESOME. 

3. The WEIRD bias in research 

Once you see bias, you can’t unsee it. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez has opened my eyes unlike any book I’ve read this decade. 

Invisible Women is about how the world is built for men as default. The gender data gap (i.e. historically most data being from a male source) is found in every area of our lives, in a world that understands medical conditions in men better than in women, makes cars that prevent male injuries in crashes more than women's, and even arranges the working week and pay structures to prioritise men. (I mean, that last bit, I was aware of.) 

But data gaps are everywhere. A lot of research studies drawing huge, grandiose conclusions are also WEIRD. In this context, WEIRD stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. 

According to a 2010 paper from anthropologist Joe Henrich, PhD, and psychologists Steven Heine, PhD, and Ara Norenzayan, PhD, the WEIRD represent as much as 80 percent of study participants, but only 12 percent of the world’s population! Crikey.

I love/hate this quote from University of Kentucky psychologist Will Gervais: “It’s the issue that we all like to talk about, but nobody likes to actually change.” Reminds me of the ad industry! A lot of WEIRD studies claim to draw conclusions about all humans. But not all humans have the same experiences.

I’ve been thinking about WEIRD a lot, recently. How many of our ‘human insights’ are actually biased towards us - whoever we are - and our dominant view of the world? 

WEIRD thinking can actually cost you money. 

Let me tell you a story about sanitary pads in Taiwan. 

When I was strategy head for a media agency in APAC, one of my clients was a brand of sanitary pads. We were working on a significant pitch for an extra piece of business, and I was leading the insights.

The CGO - an American guy called Kevin - told me what our story should be.

“Women don’t want to talk about periods. Especially not in Taiwan. Our strategy is about subtlety and personalisation.” 

I wasn’t too sure. Are women really that ashamed of their periods, I wondered? Maybe decades ago, but not today, surely? 

My APAC business intelligence team was one of the first in the world to trial the Facebook listening API (this was about 6 years ago) and we’d worked out a way to count anonymous mentions, sentiment in every market across the platform, and trends, as long as we had native speakers using the tool. We also did social media listening elsewhere, properly (i.e. not a bunch of word clouds). We had a lot of social data. 

Our insight team revealed that around 10,000 women a day in Taiwan talk about their periods in social media: about period pains, craving chocolate, being more clumsy, embarrassing moments etc. I mean, there’s a lot to talk about! It wasn’t a taboo subject. We should use this, I said. Get creative! 

“No way,” said Kevin. “I don’t believe it. That’s gross.” 

“We have proof...” I said. Showing him both the the data and some examples translated from Mandarin Chinese to English. 

“No,” he said. “This must be wrong. Women don’t do that in social media.” I should note here that Kevin didn’t use social media, nor did he have any accounts. He was being WEIRD: thinking about his own world view, and that of his closest family and friends. He assumed his view of the world was the world. “We’re going with the personalisation thing” he concluded. 

We argued for 12 hours. Me, with my data and anecdotal evidence, him with his WEIRD opinion. He wouldn’t budge, because it was “gross”. 

I had to leave Taiwan and kick off a pitch in Malaysia. By the time we had our next check-in call, two days later, Kevin had pulled rank and all the women on the pitch team agreed with his story. Talking about periods was gross. His WEIRD (and power) had won them over. That was the pitch story the team went with (subtlety, personalisation) and we lost. 

This is just one story. A story about sanitary pads in Taiwan. But it’s completely typical of WEIRD thinking. 

4. What’s the weirdest ad of all time? 

Trevor Beattie is one of my creative heroes. I love him on Twitter, and I love his ads. He’s responsible for this ad, for Playstation, featuring a girl who may or may not have been an alien. #landonyourownmoon

A fun fact - which I read in this interview - is that her laugh at the end is real, because Trevor said something funny to her off camera.

I would absolutely describe this as the best, weirdest ad of all time. It aired in the 90s, when everything that came out of the UK was cool. Ah, the 90s.

But there’s a few other weird ads that Trevor Beattie didn’t make, and I guess I’ll concede that they're pretty cool too. This must-read article profiles the strangest ads of all time, ranked.

Apparently the weirdest of them all is Mountain Dew’s Puppy Monkey Baby, which - after being broadcast to millions of homes during Super Bowl 50 - “left more than one viewer thinking they just experienced a strange hallucination.” 

 5. The weirdest things you can buy on Wish. 

I’ve been strict with my alcohol consumption in lockdown… ish. This last 12 months has been like the period between Christmas and New Year: a long sluggish limbo where booze is daily, cheese is life, you may as well finish the chocolate and the only thing in the fridge is leftover carb. The only difference is, unlike that period between Christmas and New Year, I don’t have any presents to play with. 

So I’ve had to buy those presents myself. Drunk. 

Drunk shopping is a revelation. My friend Dorothy once said to me: “the power of drunk shopping is that you only buy the things your heart truly desires.” It’s true; the YOLO mentality is strong when you’ve had four wines, and so drunk shopping has become my favourite once weekly pastime. (Once a week. Twice, max.)

Especially when I wake up to discover I’ve bought this entire outfit, including the hat, as I did a few weeks ago. (For those who don’t recognise this beauty, it’s part of Beyonce’s new Icy Park range.) 

Drunk shopping is big business! According to a study of more than 2,000 alcohol-consuming American adults conducted by The Hustle, it's worth an estimated $45 billion per year industry, with 79 percent of alcohol consumers making at least one drunk purchase. 

But it’s important to drink - and shop - responsibly. Which is why - if you’re feeling like a lush with a loose wallet, I recommend Wish. 

I discovered Wish when lockdown first began, and it’s the weirdest ecommerce site I've ever encountered. Described as “shopping made fun,” nothing you buy on Wish is normal. Wish was there when I needed a a t-shirt that looks like a pack of MacDonalds fries; when I needed a bedroom lamp shaped like a football, and even when I went through my odd and very childish flamingo phase, last summer. The best thing is… most items cost less than $20. 

If you’re new to such a unique shopping experience, The Tab have a handy list of the weirdest things you can buy on Wish right now, which include: 

• ‘Mysterious Leaf Pattern Bathroom Set Waterproof Shower Curtain Toilet Seat Cover Non-slip Mat Bath Carpets Home Decor’
• ‘Personality Pork pattern’ socks
• “Women’s Fashion Face Beauty Wrinkle V Face Chin Cheek Lift Up Slimming Slim Mask Ultra-thin Belt Strap Band”
• Worms! That’s right - Wish is so weird, it sells bags of worms. For $2. (Via Dean Buckley on Twitter.)

So…. Maybe this Friday night, grab yourself an elderflower gin or a glass of cheap Shiraz, and buy some hilarious cheap nonsense. Share your weirdest with me, and I'll put them in the next newsletter.

6. Suffering from creative block? Have a weird seance. 

With new clients and a lovely list of upcoming projects, my creative and culture company Six Things Impossible is gathering pace and I couldn’t be more excited. Amongst all this frenzied client work I realised recently that - purely by accident - I’d become a coach for people grappling with a creative block of some kind.

My primary focus has always been lateral thinking. You cannot invent great original things by being normal. The best ideas sound terrible when you first hear them. The worst idea sessions involve people sitting around shouting at each other. The most significant creative block comes when you try to be like everyone else.

You have to channel your weird. Because it's psychologically proven that the weirder you are, the more creative you are. And this requires training. 

Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson defines cognitive disinhibition as “the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival.” Weird people have a talent for allowing even irrelevent stuff to enter their brain… they have less filter, they embrace the new and unusual. They have low latent inhibitions. Here’s an example: 

“A person with low latent inhibitions would not only see a yellow desk lamp, they may also think of bananas, Spongebob Squarepants, or Spongebob Squarepants eating a banana, or possibly concoct a whole dissertation in their head about whether or not Spongebob likes to eat bananas, or how he could get them down in the ocean.” 

Get it? In 2003, Carson ran a study that found the most creative among us are 7 times more likely to have low latent inhibitions. Which led her to a powerful hypothesis: “cognitive disinhibiting allows for way more info to enter into your conscious mind–which you can then tinker with and recombine. The result: creative ideas.” 

From today (WOO HOO!) I’m launching a new series of sessions called WEIRD SEANCE. 1 to 1 coaching or group sessions based on a brief that are designed (with unique tools and techniques) to promote cognitive disinhibition and get the best ideas out of you. Let me find the oddity and originality that's already there, in you and your team. Get in touch, and let’s get weird. 

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Wow! What an issue! I feel energised, exhausted, and a little peculiar. I hope you do too!

For further reading, may I recommend Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World, by Olga Khazan