How to Miss the People Who Change Everything

The best ideas don’t come in business casual.

If everyone in your life is likeable, agreeable, and always plays by the book…
Congrats. You’re going to miss every era-defining thinker.

Originality isn’t popular. People say they want it, but what they actually want is familiarity with better lighting.

Beige isn’t your favourite colour. Stop acting like it is.

It's not your fault. We're wired to let someone else go over the waterfall to ensure it's safe for us. It's evolutionary. Originality is risky. It doesn’t come with social proof, metrics, or the safety of “this already worked somewhere else.” It makes people nervous. It makes you look unhinged—until it works. Then it gets repackaged as thought leadership and copy-pasted onto LinkedIn.

You don’t reject original ideas because they’re bad.
You reject them because they’re early.

Photo by Devilz . on Unsplash

Weird friends > Safe bets

You edge away from the friend who spirals into tangents but sometimes says something that hits you right in the spine.
You ghost the mildly unhinged. You filter out discomfort.
And with it, you filter out original thought.

You keep a tidy circle.
No awkward moments.
No friction.

Originality doesn’t always arrive in a soothing tone over a weekend coffee.
Sometimes it shows up as the friend who’s never on time and ranting about how wind works.
Sometimes it’s the one with the hot takes you pretend to hate but secretly love.

Or maybe it’s you, before you learned to self-edit.

The truth?
Some people are wrong 70% of the time.
But the other 30%?
That’s where the gold is.

We’re living in a copy-paste era.
Everyone’s cosplaying sanity.

But if you want to grow, build, or just think, you need people who surprise you.
People who say something so wild it short-circuits your brain.

Originality is a high-risk, high-return personality trait.
Most people avoid it.
Most people miss out.

So, if your group chat never disagrees…
If your work calls humans “headcount” and ideas “deliverables”…
And your dinner table lacks spark…

You’re not surrounded.
You’re sedated.

Maybe it’s time to make some weirder friends.