The People Who Shift Culture Usually Start By Ignoring What Everyone Else Is Chasing

**Matthew Gottesman** (0:02)
Welcome to The Niche Is You. My name is Matt Gottesman, at Matt Gottesman on Instagram, and this is my daily podcast where I create short, quick hitting episodes to help you uncomplicate life, creativity, and the pursuit of your highest self. There's only main character energy here. Now let's get into it.
Welcome to episode 803, the people who shift culture usually start by ignoring what everyone else is chasing.
It is a very distracted world. I used this title actually as my Substack last week, and it resonated with a lot of people.
And if you haven't gotten a chance to check that out, you can go see the rundown on my Substack at mattgossman.substack.com. And it was a bunch of bullet points just pointing to the fact that you don't have to go at everybody else's pace. In fact, I constantly urge you not to because you're then going into energy of everyone else's urgency. And we need time and space to think, to create, to answer our call. And you'll notice the ones that usually change everything, we're never really competing with the outside world. They were just really in the embodiment of their own work, of what they're here to do. And yes, that shows up in lots of the same industries that already exist. It's just that they emerge out of, well, what looks like out of nowhere, because they were really in their game. They were playing the thing that they were supposed to be playing. But more importantly, what I've noticed happens, and I've seen this in business, I've seen this in art, I've seen this in so many different realms where people ask about who inspires you and are there people that you follow or that you watch, that you learn from. And it's an interesting question because there's two sides of it. Yes, there are people who inspire me and who teach me. They'll teach me maybe skill, like how to hone in on skill, and they'll inspire me to deepen my own level of work so I am intrinsically more curious about what I'm doing. That's about it. And the reason I say that is because if you watch trends and you follow what everybody else is doing, you're not tapping into that inner knowing, you're not tapping into all that greatness as much. Maybe you're using some of it, but when you follow what everybody else is doing, or you're chasing what they're chasing, you kind of end up in this weird rat race, and you can feel it. Sometimes there's anxiousness, sometimes there's urgency, everything is urgent, sometimes there's disconnection, sometimes there's, maybe you're struggling to kind of connect all the dots for what you want to do. Maybe there's some confusion, right? Or it doesn't feel organic. So yes, the people who shift culture usually start by ignoring what everyone else is chasing. I don't want to see what everybody else is chasing. I want to see how good my vision and God's plan for me is. So in this episode, let's talk about why the people who change culture never did it by following what was already established. I mean, that's how innovation works. That's how creativity works. That's how, imagine you see something, okay, here's a perfect, great analogy. You ever see somebody in the marketplace, and I say marketplace meaning like the world in which we, because we see everything out there, and they're doing something in an area or interest or passion of yours that you can break down and be like, oh, I, you know, why are they doing it this way? And that's crazy. They presented it that way. And I would do it this way. Yes, do it your way. That's that's probably a great analogy. It's like you see somebody else doing something and maybe based on an established framework in the in that path, in that thing, and you do it differently. That is a signal. Follow signal. That's telling you something, right? Let's also talk about how ignoring what everyone else is chasing isn't rebellion. It's alignment. We don't have to make it just strictly out of like, I'm not going to do that because I want to be rebellious. No, how about instead, the reason why you don't want to chase what everybody else is chasing and do what everybody else is doing is because you want to see how much further you can push the mastery of that thing or that path or that calling or interest or career. Also, why the early seasons of building differently feel like falling behind before they reveal themselves as being ahead. Being different, my friends, may make you feel like you're behind. It's just, I think it just comes with the territory. It comes with the path because you're maybe having to experiment and put new things in the place and infrastructure and ideas and your own frameworks, and all these things that didn't exist before. And it's easy to follow a path that is completely laid out for you that says, this is how you do everything and therefore this is where it'll all come from. Provision, next steps, everything. It's hard when you're going out on your own in a lot of ways. And I don't want that to also scare you. It's actually the most liberating, freeing thing you can do. It's just that it requires a lot of honesty with yourself. I also want to talk about the difference between being contrarian and being called. You know, because I know I say a lot of contrarian statements online, but it's actually because I'm called to look at things opposite of how they were presented to us.