Alan Weiss - Million Dollar Maverick: Forge Your Own Path to Think Differently, Act Decisively, and Succeed Quickly

This is the expressway to being comfortably different and uncomfortably contrarian: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The black hole of convention entraps too many people in a gravity of failure they cant escape.

It was Bizarro World. Seventeen teachers sat in classroom seats while four students took turns lecturing to them. Unlike most classrooms in Emerson High School, the occupants in this one were paying rapt attention during the five minutes allotted each speaker. The eye contact was intense enough to require sunscreen.

This thirty-minute meeting was the complete audition and final vote for the first (and only) exchange student that Emerson would ever produce. The year was 1963, and an entrepreneurial local newspaper reporter had arranged for a Finnish student he had met to spend a half-year in each of the public high schools in Union City, New Jersey, a poor city, at the time the most densely populated city in the United States (fifty thousand people in about two square miles).

The committee of seventeen had chosen four nominees to be the return student (who would spend six weeks touring Europe, ending in Finland over the summer, since none of us was about to learn Finnish). They chose the quarterback and captain of the football team; the president of the yearbook; the president of the class; and me, the president of the student council and editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. We were apprised of the selections (back then no one argued about fairness or gender) and asked if we would accept if chosen, our parents were consulted, and then we were told to prepare to answer a question in front of the committee. The five-minute interview would determine, by immediate majority vote thereafter, who would have his life incredibly changed.

It was the height of the Cold War, and the question was this: How would you defend the United States to people you meet in Europe when youre asked about our foreign policy?

I had luck and pluck. Luck because my last name starts with W, and I was to be last in the alphabetic order. But heres the pluck. I had an inkling that this trip would have a profound change on my life, and I knew we could not just afford any college. I also knew that my hometown of Union Citythe embroidery capital of the world proclaimed the citys sign as you shot by on the way to the Lincoln Tunnel and New Yorkheld no future for me. I decided that I couldnt risk simply giving a better but similar answer to the others.

I had to give a completely different answer to truly stand out from everybody else. My turn was approaching.

I wouldnt defend the United States, I told the room of suddenly bolt-upright teachers. I would explain who we are and how were more similar to their own country than dissimilar. I went on from there.