The Power of Being Weird

Castles in the Sky #48

One of many haircut/outfit combos I have inadvertently used over the years to signal to other weirdos that I too was a weirdo.

There are a lot of different ways to be an outsider. Nobody really wants to be a misfit or a "noob." But there is wisdom in outsiders. They can be characters who challenge societal norms and reshape our understanding of what it means to belong. There are some people for whom persistent weirdness is not a weakness but a strength. One person who made this case beautifully is Paul Graham.

Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley accelerator responsible for generating some of the largest tech companies in the world since 2005. He’s referred to as “the Yoda of Silicon Valley,” both because of his prescience as an investor, and because of the wise, concise advice he disperses to founders and via essays he posts on his website. One of my favorite essays of his, where he touches on the power of being a weirdo, is “Being a Noob.” (Noob is a term borrowed from online multiplayer video games, a shortened form of “newbie” that means someone who is new to something and unfamiliar.)

In his essay, Graham makes the case that nobody wants to feel like a noob because it is embarrassing and uncomfortable. He explains this makes sense as this discomfort was a helpful signal for a long time. For most of human history, the world didn’t change that much over the course of someone’s life, so it was better to stick to what was familiar. But now, the world is changing so rapidly, that we should update our ideas about being a noob: mainly, that it is preferable to lean into this feeling, and not denigrate noobs. He also makes the great observation that, “the more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.” Meaning, that for every situation you put yourself into as a noob, you bring that much wisdom and resilience to a future situation. 

This idea that “the more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally,” really spoke to me. For three years, I lived in China, and I made a lot of friends from China and from other places all over the world. When you live in another country around other people from other countries, you may start to often play this game with yourself where, every time someone does something weird, you ask yourself, “cultural difference or personal idiosyncrasy?” After a while, you start to develop an idea of why people from certain parts of the world act the way they do, and how some people are just stone-cold weirdos. The longer I’ve been alive, the more I’ve found that I gravitate to the latter.

I was raised in a bookstore among book people. I spent a lot of my twenties traveling, hanging out with digital nomad types. I’ve spent the last eight years working with entrepreneurs. Since adolescence, I have spent long periods of my life doing (some standup and a lot of) improv comedy. Many of my closest friends and loved ones are in recovery. This is to say that from digital nomads, entrepreneurs, comedians, book people, and people in recovery, I love weirdos. I love people who don't really fit in. I love people who are rebuilding their life or have had to rebuild it before. I think that the mix of kindness, gallows humor, unusual interests, and outside-the-box thinking you find among weirdos is the most fertile soil out of which to grow an interesting, fulfilling relationship. These are the people I like helping and spending time with, and among whom I’m most myself. 

There are two weirdos, in particular, I remember quite well from China. Their names were Savant and Seamus.

Savant was a Chinese guy in his mid-twenties who I met at a Couchsurfing meetup. For the uninitiated, Couchsurfing was like Airbnb before Airbnb, but it was free and run off vibes and community vouching. It was incredible until a finance firm bought it up to find a way to make money from it and ruined it. Anyway, I thought Savant was super aloof. He went by Savant, but I never even learned what his real name was. He had the affect of a sensitive artist, taking lots of thoughtful pauses, speaking slowly and serenely with a soft voice and light hand gestures, and had exquisite taste. 

Like a sensitive artist, Savant was aloof but this never came across as pretense or touchiness. On the contrary, he was exceptionally disarming. I remember the second time I met him I asked what he’d done that day and over two minutes of thoughtful pauses, he slowly said, “I walked to the Catholic church to sit and think. It was my first time, and I am not Christian. But I could feel something, like people’s feelings and hopes were in there.” The cocktail party we were at fell away and I was mesmerized—it was like I was there with him in the pew. I grew up in Catholic churches and one throwaway line from him had added a new shade of how I feel about them. 

Then one day, Savant just disappeared and quit answering all our messages. I have no reason to suspect anything bad happened as this was common on Couchsurfing. 

Seamus was an old Irish guy. I only hung out with him for one night. In all candor, I don’t know his real name because we never exchanged names. But we hung out for about five hours. I was standing by the bar at a nightclub in Shenzhen, and suddenly he had materialized next to me. He was cracking jokes and buying drinks, but looked very out of place. He was very short, wearing a beanie and a trenchcoat, despite the fact the bar was outside and the weather was muggy. He was also about forty years older than everyone else in the club. On his other side were two friends he came with named Ralf (from the Netherlands) and Nils (from Germany), who were both closer to their mid-twenties like me. 

Seamus had me and his friends laughing all night. Multiple times he would buy a round of drinks for people nearby, or start a miniature dance party with us and some women walking by, or tell a loud, well-received joke in English or Irish-accented Chinese to a group of people waiting at the bar. I was having such a good time I shared taxis with Seamus, Ralf, and Nils to three other clubs that night, and around 4:00 am we ended up at an after-hours restaurant. As we arrived at the restaurant, Seamus went to have a smoke or something and disappeared. Ralf, Nils, and I waited a few minutes then sat at a table and decided to order food and start eating. 

When the main courses started arriving, I asked Ralf and Nils how long they had known each other, and how long they had known Seamus. Cue some hilarious stories and tons of laughter as the three of us realized that actually, none of us had met before that night, or known Seamus from anywhere except the bars we had been to. All of us had a similar story of Seamus materializing under our elbow and is getting caught up in his party whirlwind. Ralf and Nils went on to become two of my best friends during my time in China. I never saw Seamus again.

Savant, Seamus, and other people like them were some of my inspirations when I wrote the character Sami, in The Masculine Urge to Visit a Psychic Giraffe in Khartoum. In this scene, the narrator and main character is explaining what happens after he first meets Sami and is entranced with him: 

I followed Sami as he busked across Barcelona. A few times we narrowly escaped fines and capture from the authorities, as Sami never had a permit to play music publicly. He also never wore shoes. He always wanted to dance. He would eat off strangers’ plates. He was paranoid in ways that inspired paranoia in others. He was intoxicating to listen to but infuriating to argue with. He was highly logical but all of his premises were false, outright bullshit, things he misheard, and things he just plain made up. He would burp and fart and laugh like a horse after he ate or drank anything. He had an annoying habit of noting any negative emotions he sensed in you. He would not have fit in anywhere. But that did not matter, because he had a mischievous smile, kind eyes, and he could sing or play anything on his weather-beaten Spanish guitar. 

In the story about Sami, and my anecdotes about Savant and Seamus, I am trying to convey a shade of what I think Graham meant when he said “the more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.” In weirdos, we often find something transcendent. They are not devoid of their origins: Savant loved speaking in Chinese parables called Chengyu, and Seamus had an incredibly thick Dublin accent, plus he ordered Guinness at each of the four bars we went to. But you realize that, although they seem a bit ill-fitted for a given situation, weirdos develop into characters who are uniquely themselves across different situations. 

To encounter these noobs and weirdos is powerful because it makes you reconsider what you think is “normal,” and what is “abnormal.” And to embrace being one yourself is a good way to make your life happier, more interesting, and more psychologically rich.

---

This essay first appeared in Castles in the Sky 26. It is inspired by an essay written by Paul Graham called “Being a Noob.”