Celebrate The Differences

Back to Oscar Wilde.

When I first became interested in the power of developing a personal brand, it was long before the Internet took hold and it would be many years before anyone had uttered the phrase, "social media." In 2013, you hardly hear anyone talk about personal branding anymore. We call it reputation and other things. Nearly ten years ago, famed speaker Mike Lipkin would quote Oscar Wilde in his presentations when he would say: "be you, because others are already taken." We spend a lot of time talking about being different, standing out and our appreciation for individualism, but do we really mean it? Do we truly understand it?

This isn’t about business or marketing.

This time… it’s personal. Far From The Tree is a book by Andrew Solomon (special thanks to Julie Burstein for bringing this to my attention). From his website: "He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, as are the triumphs of love Solomon documents in every chapter." Solomon recently gave a presentation at Google. It is amazingly powerful. I urge you to put everything down for a bit and just watch this video. How do families deal with children who are radically different from who they are? It’s a fascinating question and it peers deep into the human condition and how special we can be…