Do you know how you will be remembered?

When all is said and done, people will remember you for how you were different. They don’t remember you for fitting in. They remember you for the things you did that were just a little bit out there….

Did you once stay up for three days straight playing a game of Risk? Do you always answer your email within two minutes of receiving it? Did you once run a marathon!!? When you’re long gone those oddities are what people will remember when they mention your name.

Maybe it’s just how human memory works, but it’s those different events that stand out even when we look at our own lives. It’s not the normal days, but those that were special in some way that we stick with us. I remember exactly where I was during the challenger explosion (even though I was very young) and, more recently, Sept 11th.

If you look back over history, the people that are the most remembered are the ones that brought something new and unique into the world. Just think about people like Newton, Freud, Darwin, and Einstein. Nobody much cares that Einstein sailed or played the violin. What they remember was that he introduced a whole new way to think about space and time.

With 5 billion people in the world, you need to be different to stand out. So often we are taught that the way to success is to blend in. Maybe it’s finally time to embrace your differences rather than trying to hide them?

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on the plot of ground which is given him to till.

-Emerson