Outlier

By definition an outlier is one of three things: a data point that falls outside of an expectation, a person working on something that no-one has figured out yet, or a label that defines a person or group that’s not part of the status quo. There is a definition that is not necessarily as orderly as those just mentioned. The outlier of thought.

You may need to be a little eccentric to appreciate the outlier. You have to know what great looks like, sounds like, feels like, to recognize it when it shows up sideways. Here is a visual that you can find to really drive it home. In the movie Back to the Future Marty is playing the guitar at the high school dance where his father and mother meet when he breaks into a solo that is too technical and advanced for the crowd to understand, but backstage the guitarist who would have been playing is holding the phone up to share the new sound. That is what an outlier looks like.

In business and in profession, being an outlier can end your career.

Philosophers were frequently argued against or dismissed. If not in totality, then on the topics that pushed logic the most. They presented confrontations directly, logically, publicly, and in ways that would embarrass powerful leaders. In those levels of society and scholastics not having the confirming or contradicting proof at hand diminishes credibility, but the days of open philosophical debate are not isolated to the courts of ancient Rome, the weathered hardwood floors of a Harvard library, or the colosseum of a stadium seated parliament. These debates happen with almost every email today.

Being an outlier is only acceptable when you have established profit generating metrics that prove successful past performance. In other words, there is no room for innovation on someone else’s dime. If there is no time for that then the only socially acceptable way to be a real thought-leader is through not being an outlier and if you are not an outlier being a thought-leader takes more time than anyone has time for. What I am saying to be frank is this; if you’re not willing to lose it all it’s best that you stifle that spirit and turn it into a hobby.

“Stifle that spirit and turn it into a hobby.” Arguably the most contradictive and offensive thing to say. It’s almost outright hypocritical, but it’s true. As an outlier you will lose credibility while you have others question it until they start quoting it.

What if you have a neuro-nontypical mind that makes you an outlier despite your best efforts to fit in?

This is not just the question of the day; it’s the question of a generation. Until the rise of the intellectual workforce neuro-nontypical minds never stood out as much. I would even argue that the eccentricity of those minds was even lauded. Had Isaac Newton not been a little OCD or maybe a bit on the spectrum we would have explored gravity at a different time. If artists didn’t lock themselves away or erratically dart off to look at a shadow we wouldn’t have had the Baroque era. If some caveman hadn’t standardized the didgeridoo we would be without one of humankind’s first instruments.

Since the classification of neurodivergent came about in the late 1990’s there is no defendable way to say with certainty that the claims I have just made are true, but, in the same breath there is no way to say they are not. Because of this, let’s just categorize my observations as “artistic liberties.”

Creative, alternate perspectives that challenge the status quo as observed by a person and through an individual angle, isn’t dangerous as long as you keep it to yourself. But, what happens when what you see, how you see it, and most importantly, when you see it demands that you say something? Well, in saying something that’s when you become an outlier.

Let me show you instead of telling you.

Take three professions that have nothing to do with each other. A hacker breaching a network. A salesperson closing an enterprise deal. A trader executing a setup on a chart. Different rooms. Different stakes. Different vocabularies that took each of them years to learn. Ask any one of them to explain what they do and you’ll get jargon specific to their world, and none of it will sound like the other two.

Strip the jargon away and watch what’s left.

The hacker narrows down a target through reconnaissance, waits for a specific exploitable condition, gets in, and only then decides what to take and how to stay. The salesperson narrows a list of accounts through qualification, waits for the deal to hit a real trigger — a proposal on the table, a stakeholder finally engaged — locks the terms, and closes. The trader narrows the market down to a setup, waits for the entry signal, fixes the stop and the target before risking a dollar, and executes. Screen for candidates. Wait for the trigger. Fix the terms before you commit. Execute. Decide if this becomes the next one or the last one.

Same shape. Every time. Three careers that would never sit at the same table, running identical code underneath three completely different names.

Most people spend a career inside one of those rooms and never once suspect the other two rooms exist, let alone that they’re doing the same thing in a different accent. That’s not a knock on them. Most people don’t need to know that. They need to close the deal, take the shot, land the trade. The room is enough.

But some people can’t stop seeing past the room. They notice the shape before they notice the vocabulary, every time, in everything. Introduce them to a new domain and inside a week they’re not asking what the words mean — they’re asking why this “new” thing feels exactly like something they already know cold, just wearing a different name tag. That’s not genius. It’s just what happens when you were never fully fluent in pretending the vocabulary was the point.

That’s the whole tell. The outlier was never the one who mastered the room they were standing in. They’re the one the room never fully fooled.

This is where the fourth definition of outlier happens — married to a community of other outliers, which statistically tends to be neuro-nontypical.

This is the group that says “birds of a feather flock together” is a cute concept. This group is more like a trivia team that hasn’t lost in years. No two people think the same and anytime the group gets together its loud, unruly, and sends everyone away with more questions than answers, apart from admiring that new thing that other new things need to be created for.

Not seeing the world in ways that the vast majority of the world sees it in my mind is up for debate. In the past the neuro-nontypical were a minority, now the intellectual workforce has more neurodiversity than was previously studied. The arguments of the old world aren’t being debated with words as much as disproven by the numbers today. The collaborative environment still has a long way to go, but we’re getting closer.

Dyslexics, people with dyscalculia, and people with autism are more comfortable with sharing their mental handicap. When they do there is more reported empathy, but there is also a lot of denial. History has taught us that outliers are needed to advance human societies, but we have only recently started to understand that those very outliers may very well be neuro-nontypical. If not that, then they are certainly unwilling to continue to turn a blind eye to the inefficiencies, dangers, or stagnation of what they are so deeply committed to.

References

Klein, S. (2023, September). “The Term Neurodiversity Is Good, But Not Good Enough.” Psychology Today. Source for the origin of “neurodiversity” (Judy Singer, 1998) and “neurodivergent” (Kassiane Asasumasu, 2000).

Wikipedia contributors. “Judy Singer.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Biographical source on the sociologist who coined “neurodiversity.”

Wikipedia contributors. “Kassiane Asasumasu.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Biographical source on the activist who coined “neurodivergent” and “neurodivergence.”

“Marvin Berry.” Back to the Future Wiki (Fandom). Source for the phone-call scene at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance referenced in the opening.

Note: the claims regarding Isaac Newton, Baroque-era artists, and the didgeridoo are explicitly framed in the text as “artistic liberties” rather than sourced historical or clinical claims, and are not offered as citable fact.