Breaking Out of the Mold

Marching to the beat of your own drum in this world is not an easy thing to do, but it's what we're judged on by our peers.

Try not to pretend that other people don't influence you, because that's ridiculous. Every single person you meet from the time you're a child influences you in some way whether you like it or not. Hell, even people you've never met that you see on the news/on TV, i.e. the President(s), perhaps Donald Trump, perhaps Muhammad Ali, etc.

Some people have more of an influence on you than others because of the way you were raised. Some influences are absolutely disastrous while others are progressive--these people have the society as a whole in mind when they make decisions. I could get all psychoanalytic about how you like a particular sport, a particular political party, a particular vacation destination, and that you like particular people based on how your parents raised you, but I won't. I'm sure that sounds common-sensical at it's core, but there are people out there that we all follow no matter how wrong they might be based on cognitive moments in our lives.

Oh, right, I said I wouldn't get psychoanalytic...

So then how do we become unique enough to get noticed? Well, that's a great question, and there are varying answers.

More than anything, though, if you can out-creative someone, that's generally your "in." What makes that idea baffeling is that there are people out there in the limelight that emphasize the opposite. Ya know, that we should be working Americans. But that's not how THEY got in the limelight. They didn't get there by simply working. They got there because they created an idea that no one else ever created. They got noticed for whatever that was, and then continued to stay in the limelight. As someone in a band, I'll admit how hard it is to get INTO the limelight even if you have talent or good idea, but I've noticed that it's even harder to get OUT of the limelight once you're in. Take Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes as examples.

If I were to give one amazing example of a person who just understood what it meant to be famous--actually I'll name 2--Arnold Schwarzenegger first comes to mind. Talk about a guy who just kept reinventing himself, right? First a body-builder, then an actor, then a governor(?!), then back to an actor. It's like, Jesus hell. If you could wrap success in a box with a bow, it would be Arnold's life.

The other person I had in mind to how someone handles fame is John Green. Don't know who John Green is, yet? That's ok, I'll give you some background from my standpoint. Years ago I found John Green making vlogs with his brother Hank on YouTube--and they're coincidentally called the Vlog Brothers. They're both hysterical with their witty bantering back and forth. Unbeknownst to me at the time, John Green is also an author. he wrote some notable novels that I'm sure you heard of, because it looks like all of his books are becoming movies: The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska, and my personal favorite that may never even become a movie--An Abundance of Katherines. He handles fame like he handled his life before he became this well-known author. He still makes Vlogs, and he's super personal with his fans by holding Q&As about his books often.

All of this said, and the reason I'm posting this, I believe that if you can't be yourself and be creative, then you missed the entire point.

This past weekend I got to meet Vinny from Vinesauce--a YouTube channel that displays video game walk-throughs and corruptions among other things--at the Too Many Games Convention in Oaks, PA. I was fortunate to go with someone who knew him, so meeting him was as easy as walking up to him and saying "hi." As you can imagine, he was a super down-to-Earth guy who just so happened to be relatively famous. You might not know who he is, but he's the gaming community's version of Mark Wahlberg. He only ever had seconds to breathe before he was whisked away by his crew for interviews and other convention-type events. (He even had his own crew, kinda like Entourage.)

If you can't be you and stand out. Go back to the drawing board. Like way back.

- PatInTheHat