Alone in a crowd

Not everyone in a crowd feels like they are part of the crowd. I was at the University of Alabama yesterday for a hotel grand opening. You had to drive through the University to get to the hotel and the place is spectacular. I am a Georgia fan so I felt like I was spying on the enemy. Ha

I watched all the activities on campus with the students playing Frisbee, drinking at the frat houses and walking to and fro in their Abercrombie shorts and flip flops. I thought about what a great time this must be for the students and wondered if they even knew how special this time was in their life. They will never have a period like this again once they graduate and get jobs and start life. There are the cool kids that have probably been cool from birth and I have often wondered how that happens. You know the ones, that just are the life of the party and have all the right actions, words and personality and just blend in perfectly and are accepted everywhere they go. They are the popular ones. They are everywhere you go and in every job, neighborhood, church and hang out.

It was so peaceful looking at these kids at the University reading under trees, hanging out in groups and eating at the restaurants and coffee shops. It looked perfect with no stress and probably very little obligations. All they had to do was study and graduate.

Then I realized there were the kids that were by themselves and not part of the fraternity houses or the Frisbee games with friends and they were the serious ones. They may have even been lonely in the crowd. There are just some people who are happier not going with the crowd and rather, just doing their own thing. If you look through history, many and probably most of the real leaders, inventors, Presidents, CEOs and the influential folks were not the popular ones. It is most likely that most of them would be classified as the non-cool type.

I was with a publicly traded company once and like the college example, it had all the perks of people, events and comradery. It should been perfect for me but for whatever reason, I was the like the college kid that wasn’t cool. I wasn’t playing Frisbee with the popular kids. And you what? I was really perfectly ok with it because I knew who I was and I was not influenced by a moment in time.

Being cool only gets you so far. It works well when no one is making money and life as they know it is one big social event like being at the University of Alabama. When you get in the real world, all the coolness seems to fade and then real life sets in and they know that they have to compete with a different set of standards and being the life of the party is clearly not enough.

I guess if I was going to speak to the kids that were walking alone at the college I would tell them to keep to their moral principles and be who they are and never try to be someone else. College is 4 years at the beginning of being an adult and life itself is much more defined after college when people can see who you really are. KT

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