Are You Willing to be Weird?

Excerpt from Wizard Academy, an article on Lucille Ball and the risks she faced and challenges she overcame... "No one wants to be average. But everyone wants to be normal. What's up with that? You can't imitate your way to excellence. It can be achieved only by breaking away from the pack, abandoning the status quo. But breaking away from the pack is also the way to spectacular failure.... A weird person who succeeds is called eccentric. A weird person who fails is called a loser. Most people just walk the middle path and wonder what might have been. If there is, somewhere, a Book of Days, what will be written in it about you? Will the book say you played it safe, never took a chance and were buried in such-and-such a place? I think Tom Peters gave excellent advice to managers when he said, "Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes."