The fallacy of ‘special’
When I started my internship at Liquicity, I fell into a trap that many young and inexperienced interns fall into.
You nailed that interview, convincing your supervisor that you got what it takes to become the best intern the world has ever seen – despite your lack of knowledge, life & work experience. Maybe you had that outstanding motivation letter or you could shine with exceptional rhetorical talent tricking anyone into believing you’re the next Elon Musk. Whatever it was – what got you the job wasn’t average performance. It was your extraordinariness.
Especially the first weeks in an internship sort of feel like a test phase in which you have to prove that what they saw in you actually exists. As a central part of my internship, I dived head first into the creation of social media posts – and hit rock bottom full on. I wanted to prove my extraordinariness and thought hard about ways to implement it in the posts. After a week of not getting the tone right, picking the wrong content and overall, completely overdoing it, it was time for change, discomfort and eventually enlightenment.
Understanding the superiority of basicness
It started as an insight joke but turned into my most important lesson. My supervisor and I usually work on the social posts schedule together in order to keep it diverse and alive. One day, I saw that he scheduled a video edit of a previous event: The caption was ‘ENERGY – ENERGY – ENERGY’. My first reaction to this was laughing and sending him a message to double-check whether that really was the caption he wanted to use. Almost a bit confused, he confirmed. With a great amount of scepticism, I posted the video, convinced that a (let’s be honest) almost stupidly basic message like this won’t be successful. It was lacking emotion, depth and anything that I learned about engaging an audience and making it personal. A few days later, however, I checked how the post was performing and it did three times better than the average post. It was at this moment, that I started to learn the lesson of the superiority of basicness.
Once I finally got over the fact that 1) it is nothing personal and 2) I did not understand the brand and its audience as well as I thought I did, I started to dive deeper into the analysis of our branding. Throughout time and research, I realised that in fact, the most basic messages were often a lot more successful than the funny, deep or cool ones. For someone whose biggest fear is the ordinary, this was a hard fact to accept. It was also necessary, however, to develop and be successful.
Basic > extraordinary
The message I want you to take from this is not: ‘basic is better’. In many, if not most, situations in life the exact opposite will lead to a higher and more meaningful success. The lesson is rather about overcoming self-induced pressure and putting your expectations aside. You are new to this; you don’t know anything about your job. Use this endless inexperience and turn it into your superpower. Throw everything aside that you learned at Uni and instead be open to your new environment. Learn as you go and strike out what you believed to know – this is about learning to know. Be humble.
And, accept that sometimes basic will get you further than extraordinary.