the myth peddled by Gladwell (and others), the attributes of genuine outsiders are usually highly disabling – with most successful outsiders no more than insiders with an attitude. Yet that shouldn't prevent us from developing an advantageous edge. To do so, however, we must first understand how we came to feel so estranged: our task for Part One.
PART ONE
THE MAKING OF AN OUTSIDER
1
THE MISFITS
First let's recognize the outsider. We're all born to a tribe, and of a landscape. It's inescapable. But we don't all fit in. Some of us – for reasons we'll explore later – become alienated from the others. We're the misfits: rejecting or rejected by the colony. Over time, we develop an outlook that emphasizes the disconnect we feel with our peers. And, soon enough, we're on the edge, looking in – or just as often looking away.
There's nothing inherently enabling about this situation, no matter what the view of fashionable commentators. There are no advantages. There's no edge to being on the edge. In fact, over millennia it's a predicament costing misfits dear. Ostracism, bullying, assault – even rape and murder – are the usual results; as is anxiety, loneliness, depression and even suicide for those not a central part of the clan. When the food runs out or the gods need pacifying, it's the outsider that's sacrificed. Hence the anxiety.
Children and animals instinctively know this, and spend their lives jockeying for position. They're vying for centrality, and detest any imposition that hinders the quest. As a child, I rejected school lifts from my father because he drove a Rover 3800 – preferring instead to trudge miles across muddy fields and spend the day with my flares rimmed with the Essex mud that denoted my membership of the clan.
Yet the terror of rejection follows us into adulthood. Even our love of fashion is little more than tribal signalling that we're in with the in-crowd: central rather than peripheral. It says that we're keen to follow our tribal leaders and be part of their ‘set’ (with flamboyant clothes little more than a bid for leadership). Fortunes are made on the assumption we'll cough up to be on the right side of the velvet rope – touching the nucleus. Nick Jones founded Soho House in London on that very premise, with his East London outpost – Shoreditch House – a constant reminder of my own inability to integrate with this human core. To forever be the man at street level, peering through frosted glass at a world out of reach.
So where are the advantages? How can rejection and isolation offer anyone an edge over their brethren? The truth is they cannot, at least not on their own. Left to its own trajectory, being an outsider involves frustration, anger, rage and – ultimately – surrender. It's totally disabling, especially when the disadvantages are hidden. Claim race, gender, disability or sexuality as encumbrances to your advance, and western society's high-liberalism throws you the law's protection and the media's adulation (though the barriers remain). Claim it's something more personal – your position in the family hierarchy, say, or your sensitivity compared to your peers, or even your poor education – and you're, quite literally, alone: condemned as pathetic and ostracized all the more.
Gaining an edge here is much harder, and lonelier, work.
The Lost Tribe
My claim's certainly pathetic, though it starts with a very modern phenomenon: dislocation. Like everyone, I came from a tribe. And I'm of a landscape. Yet the two didn't marry. We were townies marooned in the countryside. Part of the post-war East London Diaspora, my childhood outlook over a flat Essex mudscape tweaked not the slightest curiosity about the land's use or ownership. It's what writer and ‘psycho-geographer’ Iain Sinclair labels Empty Quarter Essex – ‘a floating landscape…there to be seen from passing cars, not to be experienced at first hand,’ he writes in London Orbital (2002). ‘Essex is better remembered than known.’
And I knew it in the 1970s – long before Essex Man became the ambassadors for the ‘white trash with cash’ tribe that came to dominate millennial tastes in the UK. Then, we were a lost tribe: uprooted from our urban homelands and deposited on the arable steppes beyond Abercrombie's greenbelt.
The indigenous gentry – in their flat caps and Range Rovers – viewed us disdainfully, though we'd return the contempt by vandalizing their tractors or damming their irrigation ditches. Yet we were also despised by the genuinely-poor rural natives. The offspring of farmhands and pea-pickers, they lived in shambolic enclaves with overgrown gardens and barking Rottweilers. That said, their untended plots were integral to the surrounding countryside – as were they – while our presence in the raw, jagged, sapling-dappled housing estates jarred.
Of course, colonists facing hostile natives should tighten as a group. Yet I was an outsider even within my displaced ‘white flight’ colony. My peers – all tribal warriors in the making – were no more like me than the kids we called ‘Garys’ from the ragged end of the village. I wanted to integrate but couldn't. Again, this was partly geographic. My cul-de-sac was on a different side of the ‘village’ from the neat housing estates of my clan. They played happily together – in and out of each other's gardens and bedrooms (as were their parents) – while I languished a million miles (in fact around half-a-mile) from the action.
Even when old enough to join them ‘after tea’ it meant interrupting well-established group dynamics, which made hard work of integration. So I'd suggest the riskier pursuits. Those vandalism episodes were my idea, as were the ‘scrumping’ trips to commercial orchards, the smoking parties in the churchyard, the cheeking of passing adults and the winter evenings spent ‘garden-hopping’ (a fantastically exciting sport involving stealthily traversing rows of back gardens).
Such exploits brought me to the attention of local authorities – including the churchwardens and the old lady running the Post Office. And, before long, I was the troublesome child being discussed through pursed lips and sharp looks. Banned from their houses, the distance between me and my brethren soon became more than geographic: it was sanctioned.
Divorced from Our Surroundings
Pathetic, indeed – especially for such feelings to last into middle age. But that's how it is for many outsiders. Tiny discomforts, denoting small disconnections that build into a disorientating estrangement. Certainly, bigger issues also count. Latent feelings of homosexuality, for instance, or learning difficulties or even ‘genius’: all can foster notions of being ‘other’. But they're somehow legitimized – not least because clans exist that can accommodate them. Meanwhile, the narrow degrees of separation from clan life are viewed as invalid, a response that only serves to exacerbate the unease – pushing us further towards the edge and making us feel locked inside our own circumstances.
Of course, many declare themselves outsiders, perhaps because it suits their self-image of rugged individualism (as with Hemingway) or creative non-conformity (as with Orwell). And we can hide our discomfort with defiance – even arrogance. Yet, far from being an enabling disposition (one giving us the advantages Gladwell et al would have us believe), outsiders tend to exhibit troubling and often highly-disabling attributes that both separate us from the group and, over time, reinforce our exclusion.
Are You An Outsider?
So are you an outsider? Chances are it's a question requiring no answer: most people know. Nonetheless, it's worth pointing out what sets us apart, even if it's for cathartic – rather than identification – purposes. And, please note, while there are positives to being an outsider (hence the book), nothing in the traits below offers genuine, disadvantaged, outsiders an edge. Quite the opposite.
Sensitivity. Outsiders tend to be acutely aware of their surroundings, as well as others' responses to their actions and words. And this makes them less able to unquestioningly engage: to take it in their stride. Such feelings start very young. Around 20 percent of toddlers experience early-life social sensitivity, which means – according to psychologist Daniel Goleman in his groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence (1996) – they interact less, cry more, perceive threats more readily and are acutely shy with strangers.
And while