Name: We Are All Weird
Rating: 4.4 (192 reviews)
Author: Seth Godin

What’s in it for me? Find out what it means to contain multitudes.

Have you ever met someone who was perfectly, 100% average? Probably not. Even the most mundane among us have interests, hobbies, and habits that set us apart. Stamp collectors? Weird. Psychonauts? Weird. Metalheads? Weird.

If we are all weird, why does the world seem designed for conformity? For a century, our economic, cultural, and political systems have been organized around the idea of the mass market – a mythical ideal where normal people just want normal things. However, that mass-market status quo will soon be washed away by the ever-rising tide of the weird.

Learning to ride that wave of weirdness is an essential skill for your business and personal life, and these blinks show why. Filled with insightful anecdotes and wry observations about our changing cultural landscape, this short and snappy manifesto proves that weirdness could – and should – be the new normal.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how a pregnant elephant saved a Belgian zoo;
why Wonder Bread isn’t so wonderful; and
when weirdness belongs in the classroom.

The mass market is fading fast, and the future will be weird.

A few years ago, the Antwerp Zoo was in crisis. Once a major attraction, the park was facing declining popularity. Its menagerie could no longer pull in the crowds it once had. Then its elephant got pregnant.

Hoping to generate a bit of buzz, the zoo threw the animal’s sonogram up on Youtube. It worked; the in-utero elephant was a hit, a nationwide news event. They kept going, posting polls and holding a naming contest to keep the public engaged. More and more Belgians became invested in the baby elephant. Attendance rose. The Zoo was back in the limelight.

What makes this success story stand out? The fact that it’s relatively rare. These days, major media events with mass appeal just don’t happen as much as they used to. In fact, mass market success is becoming as rare as a baby elephant.

The key message here is: the mass market is fading fast, and the future will be weird.

According to Godin, grasping exactly what this change entails requires knowing a few key terms: mass, normal, weird, and rich.

First, mass and normal. The author uses these words to describe the old way of doing things – the system of large-scale, undifferentiated production that is our current status quo. Within this system, manufacturers and marketers aim to efficiently meet the needs of the masses, by catering to what they think of as normal.

Of course, normal is relative. Being vegetarian is normal in Mumbai, but not so normal in Kansas. Either way, once marketers decide something is normal, they attempt to make it morally right as well.

In contrast, weird refers to everyone who falls outside the normal masses. This doesn’t mean people with uncommon physical features or minority identities. Instead, it means those with characteristics and qualities that are unusual by choice, that is, strange hobbies or oddball interests.

Having the resources to make those weird choices is what Godin calls being rich, which doesn’t always mean money in the bank – though that certainly helps. It can also mean having free time or community support.

This leaves you with a decision to make: do you want to be on the side of the normal masses, or use your riches to make a leap into the weird? It’s not an easy choice, but Godin believes the way to succeed in this brave new world is by being bold enough to buck the status quo and embrace the bizarre. The next blinks will explain why.

The concept of normal was invented to sell mass-market products.

Think about what’s inside your fridge. Stashed somewhere among the cartons of milk and last night’s leftovers there is probably a bottle of Heinz ketchup. At least, this is true for 70 percent of Americans.

So, how did your condiment consumption become so predictable? Blame the logic of mass production. For much of the twentieth century, companies were organized around one basic principle: customization is costly. Instead of catering to individual tastes, the most efficient way to make money was to market to the masses.

Our growing wealth and connectivity make it easier than ever to be weird.

We have always been weird – even seventeen thousand years ago. You can see the evidence today in the Chauvet caves of southern France. Here, elaborate paintings adorn the cavern walls. Even while living with few resources, early humans still desired to express their weird side, and these paintings are proof.

These days, being weird is easier than ever before. Thanks to millenia of technological development, we’ve long since left the caves behind for a world of material wealth. Innovations like industrial agriculture, electricity, and modern medicine mean most of us no longer have to worry about basic survival. Now, we can devote more of our time and energy to whatever interests us, whether that be amateur astronomy or open-source software. Essentially, we are rich.

As the normal middle keeps eroding, people will use their power to identify with their own weird tribes.

Let’s talk bread. A few decades ago, if you wanted to buy a loaf, you had to settle for plain, white Wonder Bread. Mass production ensured it was cheap, predictable, and stocked in stores everywhere. Now, artisanal companies like Bread Alone will provide you with a dozen options: spelt, sunflower, gluten-free sourdough – whatever suits your taste.

To understand this change, it’s helpful to visualize human behavior as a bell curve graph. For a given population, that’s usually a nice, symmetrical mound. Sure, there are some outliers at the fringes, but most people fall in the big hump in the middle.

Key ideas in We Are All Weird

What is We Are All Weird about?

We Are All Weird (2011) takes aim at the one-size-fits-all mentality that underlies much of our culture. For too long, marketers, manufacturers, and the media have approached the world as if all people were the same. With this perceptive manifesto, Seth Godin unravels the myth of the mass market, arguing that humanity is much more diverse, eccentric, and weird than it seems.