For some of my client work as well as my own projects, I have endless phone calls, Skype calls, coffees, meetings. (I’m a masochist: I hate it yet I love it, which is why I keep on doing it.) Combine that with having the inevitable condition called “aging” (and the assumption that your boss or client is older than you.) All of these taken together lead to one conclusion: people, meetings, conversations, and experiences all start blending in your mind and you start mixing them up. Given enough time, enough experiences, enough interactions, everything feels more alike than different.
This presents a challenge for the new employee or newly hired freelancer: even if you do great work, and even if your communication is great, you will still come off as being “just like everyone else.” Yes, a bit better at this, much better at that, and worse at this other thing; but fundamentally, to the experienced boss or client, you’ll by default look and sound like just a minor tweak on a known model.
There is a great marketing parallel here. Imagine you’re opening a pizzeria in a neighborhood full of pizzerias. Your pizzeria is just like all the others, except it has 5% higher quality pizza than any other while simultaneously being 5% cheaper. That’s great, but from the point of view of the customers, it’s basically a pizzeria like any other.
This is a real challenge and comes to the heart of the assumptions of this series. Holding your work quality constant (outside our scope here), and assuming your communication and professionalism is better than that of everyone around here (what this series is trying to achieve), you’re still basically like everyone else.
One classic solution to this isn’t to be a little bit better, but a lot better. Don’t have a pizza that is 5% better, have one that is three times as amazing as any other pizza around (because you secretly put [insert addictive substance that is 100% legal] into the pizza.) Or you’ve somehow sourced your own ingredients, so your pizza is 10% the cost of any other pizza on the block. Applying the metaphor here, perhaps your work itself is ten times better than anyone else they can afford to hire, or perhaps your communication and professionalism are ten times better than anyone else they could afford to hire (which of course it will be after you internalize all my suggestions in this series, right?)
But even after achieving either of these two, both take years to achieve and for many people are actually fully unachievable.
So, what do you do to differentiate yourself from everyone else?
Answer: don’t be like everyone else! The easiest way to do that is to choose an attitude or style, one that relates to work, and apply that to how you work in every way. Suddenly, that attitude or style you adopt gives you an adjective you can be remembered by.
People differentiate and remember things by the adjective that makes them strongly unique. Decades after graduating, my mom still asks me about high school acquaintances by saying things like, “How is your friend doing, the one who had the pet snake?” Yes, that is how human nature works, and it’s funny to me that forevermore in my mom’s mind, that’s how David will be remembered.
Here are some possible adjectives that you may want to choose, that is, a personality you may want to adopt. The one that is closest to your natural personality may make sense, or brainstorm and find another type of personality that may work in a business context that is also suited for your own nature (since you’re not an actor, you can’t magically transform into someone you’re not.)
The Teacher. Always willing to proactively turn everything into a learning experience for everyone. Of course, you have to be good at your craft to be the teacher. But you don’t need to be great, just good. In the “land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” So, if you’re a graphic designer in a company of non-graphic designers, turning everything into lots of one-minute opportunities for mini-lessons about “how to choose a font” is not only helpful, but it really makes you stand apart from the others. It’s an adjective. In many circumstances, I adopt this attitude—including in my writing this series!
The no-bullshiter. This is the most common attitude I adopt. I’m from New York and I often use that as the excuse to emphasize that, “Hey I’m from New York where we don’t do small talk, so let’s jump right in…” and I use it as a way so that everyone I work with expects me to say the hard news. This is important because this personality makes it easier for me to say hard things than it would be if I were known as “the nice guy” because the nice guy personality actively prevents you from saying the hardest things.
Note the upside of choosing a style is that it makes it easier for you to do everything you need to, in that style. But there is a downside to choosing a personality as well. The first is it limits you, if you’re going to be a strong asshole-type, it makes it harder to be just a generous guy or girl if you want to do so in one particular moment. (Sadly, more than once, I’ve wanted to be more generous than I was able to be.) So, choose your style with its limitations in mind, it’s hard to break free from that angle, at least within that one client or employer relationship. But each new client or each new job is an opportunity to grow and develop a different style and a different side of your personality. However, the downsides are, in my experience, worth the upsides—setting you above a neutral, vanilla type, like anyone else. And only you can decide if that makes sense for yourself.
