Daily Inspiration: Being Unique – “Conformity is a curse on creativity, a creator of complacency!

“Conformity is a curse on creativity, a creator of complacency! – Futurist Jim Carroll

Futurist Jim Carroll is using his Daily Inspiration blog post – one of which you are reading now – to generate material for a book he has in progress with the working title, “How to be Unique (And Why it Will Get You To Your Future Faster!)” This is one of those posts.

Questions, not conformity, are friends of innovation. You should be open enough to oppose views because that will enhance your opportunities, not conformity. Your mind should be open to differences of opinion rather than closed to ideas that don’t align with yours (to the extent that you can stomach it in today’s highly toxic social and political environment).

I’ve never liked the word ‘conformity.’ 

To me, it reeks of the failure of sameness, an admission of defeat. You are giving up on your ideas and beliefs to achieve the approval of others. Why? What’s the point?

In a world awash with the monochrome hues of uniformity, the curse of conformity is always there, and it casts a long shadow over your potential. 

You should view it for the pervasive force that it is – it’s a silent oppressor that can insidiously infiltrate your mind, urging you to blend into the background, to become an indistinguishable cog in a societal machine in which everyone thinks the same, acts the same, and does the same thing. The curse of conformity whispers the lie into your ear that safety lies in sameness, and that there is virtue in vanishing within the crowd – to be like everyone else. 

Yet, in heeding this call, you can easily forsake your true self. If you do that, you end up abandoning the vibrant spectrum of your individuality for a pretty dull, grayscale existence devoid of the brilliance that your unique colors could cast upon the world.

Conformity is a jail that can imprison your mind. Think about it this way – the shackles of conformity are forged in the foundries of fear—fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of the unknown. The fires lit in those foundries can only be cooled in the complacency of routine – and that locks you into a cycle of repetition that dulls the senses and dims the fires of your creativity and innovation. 

Conformity is a curse, because not only does it bind us to a lower common denominator of achievement, but blinds us to the extraordinary possibilities that arise when we dare to break free, to stand apart, to be the lone beacon in a sea of sameness.

And studies prove the point.

• the often referred to Solomon Asch’s Conformity Experiments of the 1950s demonstrated how individuals often conform to group opinions even when they know they are wrong – about 75% of participants in Asch’s experiments conformed to the group’s incorrect answer at least once, illustrating the strong influence of social conformity!
• a Harvard Business Review on Groupthink from 2011 found that teams with high levels of conformity were 25% less likely to explore novel solutions or engage in innovative thinking.
• another study by Innovation Excellence found that companies that emphasize conformity over creativity are 20% more likely to fall behind industry trends.
• the Stanford University Research on Leadership and Conformity group found that teams led by highly conformist leaders are 30% less likely to produce breakthrough ideas compared to teams with leaders who encourage diverse perspectives!

In other words, conformity is bad for you!

After all, to conform is to choose the path of least resistance, to live a life predefined by the boundaries of others, to stifle the voice within you that dares to question, to challenge, to dream.