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Why “Be Unoriginal” Is Actually Great Career Advice
Life Lessons From A Career In Music
I moved to London in 2007 to study bass guitar at music school.
And shortly after I started my course I figured out what I wanted from my time there.
I wanted gigs and I wanted to work.
I wanted a career.
Many of my classmates shared that aspiration so it didn’t take long before we’d ask anyone we could how we could pick up gigs and start forging out a career for ourselves.
The typical response we’d get was along the lines of “be good, be dependable but try to focus on what makes you unique. There’s so much competition out there that you need to stand out from the crowd”.
To paraphrase the advice was this. If you’re not unique then you’re not valuable to the workplace. And if you’re not valuable then you won’t work.
At first, we thought this was true and that it sounded like great advice. We very much took it to heart.
If being unique is the path to success then surely we just had to figure out what hadn’t been done already and start doing that.
Simple, right?
