A Case for Broadening the Definition of Courage

Insights about Principled Rebels Known as Niche Carvers

While I lean toward high extraversion, I hold a mantra when socializing - “you must beat the book.”¹ Yeah, yeah, I read the headlines of how nothing distinguishes unhappy and happy people more than the quality of their social life. I’ve heard of research showing that “loneliness is as lethal as smoking 15 cigarettes per day” / though this finding is questionable² regardless of whether the surgeon general thinks it’s true. In truth, many of us possess passionate interests that are equally and sometimes more valuable than socializing. Interests just happen to be harder to study because they lie at the core of a person’s individuality.

Lynn Hill prefers scaling El Capitán over your wild bash

What beats reading a great book is spending time with people courageous enough to express their individuality.

Never again will someone walk the earth with a similar biological temperament, personality, history of positive and negative life events, values, beliefs, attitudes, and interests. Consider temperament alone. During infancy, each of us could be classified on a matrix of dimensions. In just a few months of life, someone could answer these questions about us:

1. How physically active are they?

2. How well do they direct attention to a desired object or person?

3. How often do they experience positive emotions?

4. How often do they feel negative emotions such as fear, sadness, and frustration?

5. How is their capacity to resist an impulse and switch to a different behavior (otherwise known as effortful control)?

Bestowed with a set of parents in a particular geospatial location, you rose to walk the earth with unique motivational sensitivities, pulling you to certain interests and not others.

Without the desire for status and fitting in, why would anyone show a similar investment of time, energy, attention, and money as anyone else?

You hold a diverse set of personal stories about virtue and vice in action.

You accepted a diverse set of risks, choosing aspirational opportunities over mere preservation.

As a result, your greatest gift to another person or group is the expression of this individuality.

This is the province of a rebel that I coined The Niche Carver.

Niche Carvers are outliers. They are weird. They feel pride in their agency. Niche Carvers embrace what makes them unique and forge a path that works for their individual differences. They deviate from the herd and act in ways that increase their well-being without obstructing anyone else's.

It is an act of courageous self-expression to express unusual interests and preferences. Because when we notice beauty or awesomeness, there is a strong desire to share this with someone else. When someone accepts this bid for connection, beauty is amplified and the ripples of influence begin. The stranger our interests are, the greater fear exists that bids for connection will go unanswered.

I can’t help but think society’s tendency to focus on diversity in terms of group affiliation instead of what individual outliers offer partly accounts for why diversity initiatives and trainings fail. From this origin began a conversation with philosopher Nick Riggle, author of This Beauty and On Being Awesome.³ Our conversation hinged on the potentially transformative act of expressing one's individuality.

For new ideas on beauty, awesomeness, love, and fulfillment, watch/listen to the conversation below…

Please support my work by sharing it widely (and click the free ❤️ button). For my handbook on how to be an influential outlier, read The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively.

And If You Missed the Last Issue…

A Unified Approach to Managing Emotions and Pursuing Purpose in Life

1. Now of course I make time for close friends and family. In general though, some of the beautiful things about aging span self-knowledge and autonomy. If you don’t want to socialize, screw it, know what you love and do what you love. If you are a bibliophile, make sure to go through the archives for my annual recommendations for books I read over the years including 2022.

2. Before the year 2015, scientists produced at least 25 published studies on the association between loneliness and cigarette smoking. Fourteen of these studies using adult populations and 11 used adolescents aged 18 or lower. Only 50% of the studies with adults found a statistically significant correlation between loneliness and smoking and only 55% of the studies with adolescents found one. Several studies only found an effect for men but not for women. Several studies only found about a one cigarette per day difference between the lonely and non-lonely. Now if you move to mortality risk, you must use a study that compares loneliness and cigarette use on mortality risk. In a study of 326,169 women and and another study of 296,913 adults, the differences aren’t even close. The most isolated 9,667 women studied had a 30% excessive mortality risk over the rest of the sample. As for the women smoking 15 cigarettes per day? There was a 180% excess risk of mortality over non-smokers. Not exactly close - don’t smoke a lot. Combined together, the findings are much less impressive than the beautifully tight, simple storyline authors, journalists, and TED speakers love to pronounce. Be wary of simple singular numbers for complex human behavior.

3. Much gratitude to the Family Action Network for facilitating this conversation and a wide variety of others on the most stimulating and scintillating topics. Everyone can access future talks here.