When Barack Obama was a candidate for President of the United States, he uttered a comment that may well be his defining moment; like JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,“ or FDR’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.†His went like this: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.†Of course in the heat of political battle, his detractors dismissed this as just another candidate claiming to be the voice of change as they all seem to be, opening the issue of whether or not change was really needed. History will probably take that to be extremely prophetic as a maxim for getting things done. “Somebody has to do it, so it might as well be me.†You can only be different if you are on the fringe of normalcy looking for new ideas. Of course, another American president, Theodore Roosevelt, said, “Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.â€
I love being the lunatic among normal people. It is boring to always be predictable and follow humanity through the rutted road of status quo. A friend of mine once said he despised the status quo because there were so many other quos to explore. Maybe he didn’t exactly have the correct translation of the Latin phrase, but he makes a good point. This week we defined fringe behavior and looked at its good side and bad side. In order to use fringe thinking to our benefit we need to redefine it and learn how to live the fringe life. Come over to the fringe side. We have fun.
Image credit: marishaz / 123RF Stock Photo
August 19 - The Definition of Fringe – There are some words in the English language that we toss about as if we really know what they mean. When someone uses the word “fringe†it has to be examined in context to determine what meaning is associated with the word. In a phrase without obvious context, it is left up to the listener to determine if the connotation is positive or negative. – more –
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August 20 – Value of the Fringe – From the time you decided to burst forth from the womb you started on a course that would inevitably expose you to the fringe. Mommy and Daddy protected you from bad people, but your very being is quite different from them even though genetically you may carry some of their physical characteristics. Every person capable of thinking, growing, and experimenting needs the fringe to expose them to the tails of a normal distribution curve of thinking. – more –
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August 21 - Danger of the Fringe – The dark-side fringe people never live in the shadows where nobody can see them. Instead, they are not only visible, but generally advertise their presence very noisily. They are hard to miss, but their hidden agenda is usually cloaked in subversive messages. This may not really be malicious behavior, but instead comes from an unnatural desire to propagandize their message even though it may not be a well thought out idea. – more –
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August 22 - Redefining the Fringe – The fringe elements of our society can be identified with characteristics that are on the tails of just about every bell shaped distribution curve. We make assumptions either consciously or subconsciously that we are the “normal†case and people not like us are measured according to where we think we lie on that curve. We get excited about new ideas that always seem to spring from somewhere along the fringes. – more -Â
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August 23 - Being the Fringe – There is nobody else in the world like you. Even identical twins are not genetically the same. There are approximately 7 billion people on the planet today representing about 6% of all people who have ever lived. Doing the math, you are not that proverbial one in a million; you are one in 116 billion. – more -Â
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