In your heart, you want to stand out from the crowd. There comes the stress right there.

The Stress

During the process of you transforming yourself to “stand out,” you are still part of the crowd. When you are there and becoming someone that is not one of them, there is a lot of resistance from all quarters.

Think about it – you are working yourself to glory from within a tribe to get yourself stand out of that tribe.

If you are not willing to go through the stress, you will never succeed in standing out, ever.

Let us assume that you successfully managed to transform yourself and were standing out of the crowd. If you think the work stops when you successfully “stood out,” you are wrong. The work really begins now.

The Straddle

The fact that you stood out does not mean that you are someone superior to those who remain in the crowd. The real story is that many people who are in the crowd “stand out” too in their own way may be in another domain of life – art, cooking, flying, chess, horse riding or something that you may not even have a clue about. Having this in the background is important and serves as an ego check right out of the gate.

For the foreseeable future, you will now have the challenge to “straddle” between “standing out” and “fitting in.” Why? simply because the crowd was your tribe and it will be for quite some time. You can’t automagically achieve something without the support of your tribe and the tribe has to feel you are one of them in order to support you.

To be successful, in the near and mid-term, you need to be a master of the straddle else you will get back into another kind of stress.

All the best for distinguishing yourself. For a quick set of basic tips, please look at
25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself (free download)