The Groove Issue 39 - Three Ideas On How To Escape Conformity
THREE IDEAS ON HOW TO ESCAPE CONFORMITY
Leadership is the willingness to move in a different direction from what everyone is doing. There’s nothing more uncreative than to constantly conform to what others think or do. Conformity can happen at the top level of decision making, or it may arise when a social setting alters people’s perceptions of the world.
When someone’s judgment conflicts with a group, that person will often conform their judgment to that of the group. This herd mentality effect has even been proven by science.
Here are 3 ideas on how to increase creativity and leadership while avoiding the trap of conformity:
You do You
Roy Lichtenstein in his studio at 190 Bowery, New York, 1969, surrounded by some of the works in the cartoonish, Benday-dot style, we know him for. Photograph by Lord Snowdon.
The 1950s in the United States were marked by the Cold War and the emergence of Abstract Expressionism; a new, exuberant, unconstrained art movement that rejected all that had been done in the past.
Roy Lichtenstein was developing his incipient artistic career in Cleveland, Ohio, conforming his work to what he was surrounded with: intimate paintings and prints in the vein of Paul Klee that made fun of medieval knights, castles and maidens. He had a witty sense of humor and didn’t take himself seriously, but something was off. He couldn’t really relate to the paintings or see his true self in them.
These two paintings are examples of what Roy Lichtenstein was making when he was trying to conform to the Abstract Expressionism surroundings of the time. On the left, Cowboy on a Horseback; oil-on-canvas, 1951; on the right, Untitled, oil-on-canvas, 1958.
In June 1961, Lichtenstein returned to an idea that he had been playing with and felt drawn to: a combination of cartoon characters from comic books with abstract backgrounds. “It occurred to me to do it by mimicking the cartoon style without the paint texture, calligraphic line, modulation—all the things involved in expressionism,” he said. What Lichtenstein had done was to take the “Benday dots,” the tiny mechanical patterning used in commercial engraving, to convey texture and gradations to his paintings, delineated with color-block contours and rendered in hard, vivid color with all traces of the hand removed.
This is how the true Lichtenstein style that we know was born. The dots became a trademark device, forever identified with him and Pop Art. The gestural abstraction he had been practicing was just a way to conform. When he switched to what he really wanted to explore, Lichtenstein became a central figure of pop art and eventually, a legend.
Stick to Courageous Projects
The Back to The Future promotional poster designed by Drew Struzan in 1985.
Being bold and having full ownership of your ideas is crucial for creativity and leadership. It was 1980 and young filmmaker and screenwriter Rober Zemeckis was aching to have a hit in Hollywood. Nothing he’d produced, directed or written had been commercially successful, even after doing a couple of projects produced by Steven Spielberg.
Zemeckis and his partner Bob Gale wanted to develop a film about time travel but were struggling on a satisfying narrative. After much rewriting, they came up with the script for Back to The Future.
Columbia Pictures passed for not being “raunchy enough.” The movie was then shopped to Disney, but their execs declared it too sexually perverse, because they interpreted the story as a mother falling in love with her son. The script was rejected approximately 40 times, sometimes multiple times by the same studios. Zemeckis and Gale didn’t give in to the pressures of rejection or changing their project to conform to an idea of what the market wanted.
Four years later, Universal eventually picked the movie up and Back to the Future went on to become the highest-grossing movie of 1985. By the end of its theatrical run, the film had earned an approximate box office gross of $210.6 million. Not only was Back to the Future and its sequels, huge commercial successes, but the film was inducted into the National Film Registry, having been deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" and deserving of preservation by the Library of Congress.
Go Against Popular Wisdom
The Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street founded in 1996, continues to be a solid business in 2021. By contrast, Crumbs, opened 7 years after following the idea that “everyone wants cupcakes”, expanding at a vertiginous pace without paying attention to the signals of a saturated market and eventually declaring bankruptcy in 2014.
When everyone agrees on something or there’s a pattern that has turned mainstream, it’s time to take a different route.
I remember during my early years in New York how people went crazy for cupcakes, in part because the original Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street had been featured in Sex and the City in 2000. There suddenly seemed to be a cupcake store in every corner.
Crumbs Bake Shop was a bakery that opened in 2003 as a small mom-and-pop style shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nothing wrong with wanting a piece of the cupcake business if that’s what your passion is, except that it was already a very saturated market. The owners of Crumbs took loans, capital injections from investors and grew at an insane pace in a short period of time.
Believe it or not, Crumbs went public in 2011, listing its stock in Nasdaq. Fast forward to 2014 - Crumbs went bankrupt, got delisted and nobody had any desire to help or revive the failed business because the sales numbers couldn’t support the gigantic operations, much less pay the enormous debt the company had.
If you identify as a nonconformist, or if you want to be one, it’s a good idea to look at what’s happening in the margins, go against the conventional approach and disagree with the way things are done. Not for the mere intention of being belligerent, but because you truly know there are better, different, or more interesting ways to execute your vision.
PS: I’ve been writing for Entrepreneur Magazine and contributing different articles from those found on The Groove. You can read them here.
PS2: Quick reminder that my creativity for business masterclass has a new evergreen format and is now open for enrollment. This is the only course you’ll ever need to take your ideas to the next level.
Like Prachel Carter, one of my previous students says, “this is the mother of all online courses” and “the gift that keeps on giving”.
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Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
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