Nature is a genius. It hates inbreeding and embraces diversity. It’s a perfect model of tolerance amongst races, species and environment, and has a built-in antipathy for nepotism.  Even when the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, its seeds are transported miles away once the fruit casing has disappeared. Natural selections modus operandi is to filter the best characteristics of the strongest of the species and combine them to form the best possible hybrid combinations that will survive the test of desolation and competition. In nature, two things are rarely created equal. Capitalism works along the same lines. In short, being one of the herd automatically qualifies and dooms you to almost certain extinction and/or sublimation. Its no use passing on weak genes, and theyll quickly be weeded out.

Its a bizarre thing then that the human heart so desperately cries out for acceptance that we will do almost anything to conform and be like everyone and everything else. The message throughout our lives is to keep our heads down, get on with it, dont stick your neck out and be like everyone else. But who does that serve? Its certainly not natures way of doing things, and it doesn’t help people personally to achieve what they want. We need to ask ourselves exactly who is placing that directive in our heads. Who benefits from conformity?

We adore children for their innocent characters, their quirks and their individuality. We encourage and nurture young humans according to the skills we discover in them as they grow. We look for things that set them apart from their peers and eagerly romanticise about how they will be when they are older and how they will change the world around them. It is their fundamental differences from others that we celebrate. The joke goes that all newborn babies look like Winston Churchill.

But something happens in the intermediate years directing surrounding pubescence when the hormones kick in that stir us in the storm of the infamous teenage era of our lives. Suddenly it is dangerous to be different or stick out from the crowd. Extend your neck out and it gets chopped off. Difference and diversity are a threat to being accepted in our social groups, and even form the basis of more horrid and malignant attitudes such as racism and tribalism.

So we push each other down, and we persecute the ones that don’t fit in with the majority. We swarm together for safety in numbers. We enforce conformity into each other at the very time we need to be reinforcing and developing our individual gifts and talents that will enable us to make meaningful contributions to our societies and cultures. One way we set this ball in motion is through uniforms, we physically clothe people the same so they become faceless parts of a larger whole. In war (and places like Guantanamo Bay), uniform is frequently used as a weapon to depersonalise prisoners and destroy all sense of their own autonomy.

In many situations, such as the military and sport, creating similar functional units is advantageous and necessary for basic teamwork operation. But clothing uniforms are also a powerful symbol, one that we experience first in school dress and then replicate socially in fashion trends. In business, the uniforms are suits, and on the high street, they are whatever celebrities are seen wearing in gossip magazines. We mandate that the cogs in the wheel identify themselves as being part of the greater machine by marking themselves through their appearance.

For a colony of worker bees performing the same function, thats fine, but when we need more advanced and complex structures that grow and operate more effectively, we need to promote individual skills. In an organisation as extreme as the army, we subdivide into departments such as the SAS, where the uniform is removed and small groups are specifically trained in particular operating areas. Generalisation at this point is less favourable when compared to specialisation, in the same way as our education system works on the basis of increasing focus on key interest areas as students progress up the ladder.

But the comfortable protection that merging into our surroundings affords us comes at a very, very heavy price. Being one of the herd comes with a nasty sting in the tail. Anonymity. An existence spies call the grey man they try to recruit who goes unnoticed.

The music business is a very fickle industry, so is an ideal place to start exploring the notion of what it means to be different. If we look back through contemporary history, the most successful of artists all typically go against the grain, break the mould and are consequently remembered for generations. Once the pioneer has been discovered, we then see an influx of copycat rubbish that rides on the back of the frontrunner. Acts like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Limp Bizkit, Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, Nirvana, Prodigy, Marilyn Manson, Oasis, U2, Spice Girls and The Killers almost invented their own new genres and pigeon holes. They redefined the scene.

Music scouts are always on the look out for the next big thing, that holy grail of the band that has a truly unique sound and image that is completely different to what has come before. A new genre-setter makes a fortune because it disrupts the status quo, grabs the limelight quickly and is refreshing. All those things help to make their proponents a lot more money than acts that sound like someone else or dont stick out too much. In fact, the more different they are, the more money they tend to make. These are the people other bands claim as their influences, artists you may not necessarily like, but who bands that come afterward are compared to.

We can extend this principle to many other things. The bottom line is that being different means your value, or worth, is higher than the average. Too much circulation makes the price go down. Being different and rare means that the price on your head is greater than the rest. For that, nature rewards you by automatically making sure you are more attractive as a mate and your genes are passed on. Naturally, its not only just being different that counts, you need to be of a higher quality as well. Being different draws attention, but the rest is up to you.

There is nowhere it is more important to be different than the business world. Your viability, and your sheer survival depends on being different. Business schools use 2 terms to describe the thing you have that differentiates you from the others. The first general term is your USP, or your unique selling point. The second is an investment term, known as your sustainable competitive advantage (SCA). Lots of other phrases are bandied about, such as proposition (e.g. What is your value proposition? fuck off), but none as are important as your differentiator, or the thing you do that no-one else does. It is the reason people buy from you and not from someone else. The worst fear of anyone in any industry is to be labelled as a me too.

The strength, or defensibility, of what you offer is what decides whether you will succeed or fail, and how much what you have is worth. It is what you have that your competitors don’t, and/or what they cant copy or emulate. If you don’t have one, you’re dead in the water. Nobody will be able to find you for all the others, they wont have a reason to buy, they will always pick the cheapest option and your competitors will just adapt in days to outrun you and put you out of business. Many times that unique selling point is time-limited, which is where sustainability comes in, referring to your long-term prospects.

In property and retail, it is typically the location. In bioscience and engineering, it is usually patents. In content and technology, it is your intellectual property. The rest of the time its the fact that you have obtained a contract or the rights to do something exclusively. Occasionally its because you got in there first and swooped up the vast proportion of the available market before anyone else got there. But you always have something that the others don’t which sets you apart from them.

On that basis, you’d expect to find a high street and Yellow Pages full of unique companies and businesses. Unfortunately thats just not the case in reality, but its the reason so many new businesses fail. It assumes that everyone creates a new thing or makes up their product lines of things they innovated. But USPs and SCAs are so much more subtle than that. You dont need a unique product or service to succeed, and you dont need to be the mad inventor in the garage. You just need to have a unique angle, approach or take on something. When youre buying something when youre shopping, youre seeing all this subconsciously.

The naïve try to do everything. They have a great idea and try to get the widest customer base and please everybody. They think by covering as many people as possible and casting their metaphorical net as wide as is possible they will have the best possible chance of success. But the opposite is true. What the great successes have shown throughout human history is that you need to specialise and focus, laser-like, on one particular problem or pain you can resolve. This key area you focus on is called your niche in business-speak. The narrower the niche, the greater the need, the simpler the proposition, the more likely you are to succeed.

And thats what I personally call the open secret. You need to find your niche, and there will be many as you go through your life. Those things that differentiate you are your edge, the something different, or x-factor you have that others don’t.

A good example I often give is of someone offering translation services. If you speak fluent French and make money by translating and/or interpreting French, you will be one of 1000 others doing exactly the same. The numbers, and your chances, aren’t great. But lets say you also speak Mongolian. There wont be many of those, in fact you will probably be the only one. The chances are you will get 100% of the enquiries, and your client will turn to you one day and ask if you also translate French. The moral here is attracting business through addressing a specific niche and growing from there.

This also happens with people looking for a job. They send hundreds of copies of their CV to absolutely everyone, generalise widely, and try to gain the broadest range of skills to appeal to the maximum number of employers. In the city, they call it spread-betting. Its particularly bad in IT, which everyone and his dog wants to get into. Im often asked what skills are the best to learn, and I reply the same each time, which is to specialise in a niche. A niche means fewer competitors, greater demand and less supply. Put those together and you have a much higher probability of getting both noticed and hired, and a higher value for when you come to negotiate what you get paid.

All the greatest success stories are of a company creating a very simple product that does one thing very, very well. Coke makes a great drink. Amazon sells every book cheaper than the high street. Levis make great-fitting jeans. Skype offers a free internet phone with great call quality. All of these companies do other things too, but they are primarily known for addressing a narrow niche with an amazing, easy product that is only for that niche. They add on additional stuff later.

The best IT contractors focus on a particular application of a technology in a specific industry of market (for example, Oracle database design for HR payroll processing in Latin America using Peoplesoft for a chemical company), as opposed to the worst, who generalise (programming databases) When recruiters look to hire, they look for the person in the pile of CVs that has got closest to doing what they want to do. They have a specific role and project in mind. Generalise at your peril, as you will be entering the lottery.

And incidentally thats a great secret of getting recruited or winning a client. The person searching already knows what they want and is thinking in terms of a project that is already planned. You just need to fit into their design, and not try to change it or cause any pain for them. In business, people think in terms of their end product rather than the skills needed to produce it.

But school and painful memories of growing up get in the way and pollute us in later life, for some as long as their whole three scores and ten. Because our thinking is ingrained with the mentality that we get ourselves in trouble if we stick out from the crowd, fear creeps in and we do what we can to slip back into it for the familiar. We daren’t do anything for fear of being criticised or humiliated. We opt to become jack of all trades, but end up as a master of none. The obscurity of being one of the masses shields us and falsely makes us feel that its a safer bet. Its a fools paradise and a shortcut to a lifetime of warm oblivion. The only warmth you get from spreading your bets is the prospect of the assurance that you will remain unknown and irrelevant.

And so it goes on MySpace. A look around this place is depressing. Every single person likes the same thing, and is desperate to appear to fit in with everyone else. That fear of sticking out is painfully obvious. I’m not saying everyone should be radically different from each other, but the fear of being different is irrational and illogical. Difference is what sets us apart, draws attention to us and attracts others into our lives. Look through the profiles yourself, as the people you notice will be those who have something interesting about them that really sticks out. That could be an opinion, a viewpoint, a taste, a dislike, a physical trait or anything else. Just something that says I have something to stimulate and interest you.

Thats the way I think when it comes to people, and I’m quite open about it. I don’t want members of the herd as my friends, I want interesting people around me who bring something to the table and contribute something unique to my existence that I hadn’t seen before or could never hope to have by myself alone. And that goes for people that don’t agree with me or don’t get on with me, as I need them for balance. I may not agree with them or even like them, but having them there is important for giving me the other side of the coin, so to speak.

Im a stickler for it in the girls I like. In fact you could say that I’m absurdly picky about them having that extra magic, as otherwise they just appear like dolls in a shop window. There are so many beautiful women, so many who are great company and so many that are in the mid-mediocre range in between. But only 1% have the special something that utterly compels me. I couldn’t even explain what I mean even if I had 50 sheets of paper and another 50 years to talk it through. Its just a feeling you get when interact with someone that they are more than their skin, their baggage and their mind. I like and get on with a large range of people, but even between them Id say there are a fraction I could fall in love with. For that, you need to stand out, and sadly, its very rare for that to happen.

Maybe I’m different to the normal FHM lad in that regard, and Im very glad of it. I don’t get excited about blondes, lapdancing, big boobs, nice asses and legs on their own. I don’t have a fetish for brainiacs or a need to be domineered over. You being a model doesn’t excite me, neither does the fact that every guy in the street is staring at you with their mouth wide open. I need fire. I need drive. I need a hilarious wit, a beautiful command of the English language and the intensely stimulating conversation it makes up. I need compassion and sophistication. And I probably ask and need far too much.

Marketing types call this type of approach to life personal branding, which is a fancy way of talking about how you package yourself for communicating with others. We all have gifts, talents, opinions, experience, vision, purpose, thoughts and abilities that set us apart from everyone else. We are all individuals who co-exist with others as part of a much greater ecosystem, and its important to give back to that community in kind what it has taught us. Its important for us to determine who we are as individuals as soon as possible and be different so we can educate and influence others. We must be diverse so we can be strong and vibrant as a society and a race.

Diversity is a word a lot of people associate with racism and the chronic immigration problem in the UK. Nothing irritates me more than idiotic, nationalistic ignorants ranting on about how they hate immigrants and immigration in general. When you distil those idiotic tabloid-inspired beliefs you get down to the universal fact that most believe immigration and multi-culturalism is a healthy thing, but its in fact rife and uncontrollable invasion by other ethnic groups that angers them. The key to that is the word uncontrolled. Nature has controls, and she enforces them ruthlessly.

Difference also threatens a lot of people, as its unusual, sometimes uncomfortable and means a disruption to the way they are used to doing things. We don’t always know how to react to unexpected and seemingly irrational events and groups, but that is a discipline about welcoming change more than anything else. Whats important is that we inspire and encourage people to find the parts of themselves that are different, and not only to be proud of them, but to market and exploit them for their own good and the good of all of us.

No-one is saying you should immediately go out and dress like a goth, change your name to something weird and esoteric or behave in a way that would get you thrown into an asylum. But as it is in business, its far more subtle than that. What do you have to talk about over dinner? What interesting things do you do in your life that are unlike other people? What are you, and what will you become known for? How do people feel after you’ve spent time with them? What is the thing you want to do that no-one else has ever done? What things do people associate you with? What one word would they use to describe you? Why should anyone listen to, or be attracted to you over anyone else? Cant think of anything? Think harder, because those things are there in everyone. Ask yourself who you admire, and you will find they stick out in your mind as they are, or were, different.

Interestingly, all the things you think are different almost certainly aren’t. Getting steaming drunk isnt new or interesting; neither are drugs or your silly showing off about material things that are forgotten as quickly as it takes you to brag about them. Being banal, neutral and or uninformed is a personality trait for some, but a defensive thing for others. Everyone loves their friends and family, everyone wants to be rich and famous, everyone thinks they are reasonably attractive, everyone is a generalist. In fact, just about everything is a generalisation. I can get any of that anywhere, from almost anyone. Why should I get it from you, or share myself with you, over them? If this sounds weird or selfish, think again. The only difference is that I’m saying it out loud when you think it in your head.

Develop interests that are different to those of other people. Deliberately think in a different way and make an effort to see things in a different light to the way that others see them. Travel to interesting places and ask the people that live in them about how they view their world. None of this is automatic or there for you to do now, you have to make the effort to get off your ass and be creative. Get stuck in and go for it. Be brave and don’t fear walking away from the herd. The greatest things and people in history have always been different to the norm. In fact the only things that have ever mattered or changed anything have been because they challenged the way things were already being done or disrupted their cultures and/or societies.

There is no-one like you in the whole world. You’re formed from the unique combination of your character, your genetics, your talents, your upbringing, your mistakes,  your influences, your teachers, your experience, your successes, your ambitions, your dreams, your vision, your thoughts, your opinions, your environment and so much more. You cant help being individual as no-one could possibly have the same concoction of all those factors in the same measures you have them. The trick is to find out about yourself, as you’re the worlds expert on you. Once you recognise yourself, you can begin to develop your edge.

Its an open secret because its obvious to most once they think about it, but they don’t practice it in their own lives. They tread the same path they see everyone else walking down, of being as general a bystander as possible so they don’t miss anything or get into a confrontation of some kind. Some people do work it out, and they get places very quickly, leaving everyone else to wonder how they did it. And they wont tell you how, simply as its not in their interests to, and they had to get off their ass to work it out and believe you should have to do the same. You’re already subconsciously looking for all that edge in everyone and everything, but most people don’t connect the dots and work it out to use it in their own approach to life.

The decision is whether to merge into the general background blur, or to be something more. If what you want to do is no more than the former, then count me out. I’m beginning to find out what mine are, and maybe someday well get the chance to tell each other.