Me and The Crazy Ones – a Story

I have always loved the story of The Crazy Ones, from the Apple “Think Different” ad campaign of the late ‘90s.

The message I take from it is about being brave enough to break with convention, and try something different, even radically different.

When I first saw The Crazy Ones, I was a running a small business, mainly devoted to helping young mothers return to the workforce, as Windows and the PC were disrupting the workplace.

The story of The Crazy Ones so resonated with me.

For many of those Mums, not all of whom were young, who came through my coaching, I was changing their world.

I was giving them new skills, to thrive in the midst of the new technologies that we were being bombarded with.

For all of us, being digital immigrants brought a huge learning curve, along with the need for lots of self-belief and courage. This was something I found in The Crazy Ones, without exception.

But The Crazy Ones did more than that for me. I had always been prone to “think differently”, to see things and have ideas that were “a bit off the wall”!

Now I had a validated model, or more correctly, lots of validated models, who said that I was not wrong, but rather it was OK to have a different viewpoint.

Sometimes, being (and thinking) different scares people. Sometimes it scares me!

But every time I get a bit scared, I replay the words of Steve Jobs about The Crazy Ones :

“You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.”

I have always changed things, and looked to change things.

I am non-conformist, I am unconventional, I am a maverick!

That IS me! And I am proud to be who I am, even if some say that I’m a little CRAZY!
(But I am in good company!)