On normal

**Celio **is a private clothing brand from France. If you live in France or a french speaking country, you know Celio. Think of them as H&M with better quality and styles, or Uniqlo with shops designed by somebody’s nephew.

What it’s interesting about Celio is their Slogan: Be normal; As a brand designer, I think about what it took for this slogan to pass; It couldn’t have been easy. Brands don’t usually aspire to be normal. They want to become standard, like Apple or Nike, but not normal. Apple and Nike are standard, but they wouldn’t call themselves normal and neither would you. People don’t usually aspire to be normal. Being normal is the status quo that we try to escape.

But having had my own challenges in life, I remember a time when I did aspire to be normal. Being abnormal is.. well… very not normal. We’re not built for it. The nail that sticks gets the hammer and your boy got his fair share and leaned the same lesson as everyone: Be more fucking normal.

One challenge that I found most vexing is when I didn’t know what normal was. How much work do normal people really do on a daily basis? What does a normal weekend look like? What constitutes normal? I didn’t necessarily want to be it, but I wanted to know so that I would orient myself around it.

When I saw that slogan today, it reminded me of that time when normal was an aspiration. It reminded me to try and be normal in most of what I do, and be very mindful and intentional of the things that I do outside the norm. You can be abnormal about many things. You can do super intense work, you can be very emotional about your relationships or very distant. But you need to be normal about most other things because those are what anchors you down and allows you to enjoy your abnormality and even weaponize it and harvest it.

There’s a power to normal. You can try very hard to get an outcome and end up going backwards. Sometimes, just letting it go, letting it be normal yields most of the result. Let entropy do its thing, let the efficient market play its role, let serendipity waltz in. You can then jump in and inject minimal abnormality and get very disproportionate results.

This is why I sometimes I get mad about mediocrity. It doesn’t take much to do most things. If you enroll in a university program, you’re pretty much guaranteed a degree. It’s not that much work to be normal. If you’re an apprentice engineer, riding the wave for a few years will get you much further that you’d think. You don’t need to do much. The law of diminishing returns is against you. The other 80% of effort only gets you 20%. That’s a bad deal. But strangely, 10% more effort placed thoughtfully sometimes gets you shockingly immense results.

I think this is why europeans and people who wear colorful beanies are so ahead in life and seem to have their shit figured out. They don’t. I asked them. They’re not doing much outside of normal and when they do, they sometimes reap the benefits that you and I see and are amazed by. Look at this guy jumping off mont-blanc, look at that guy writing 3 books at 32 years of age, look at that guy making so much money with this or that. If you look under the hood, apart from that one or two amazing things, they’re a healthy bed of normal, and dare I say: Boring.

Normal works because normal is normal and normal works. Sounds nonsensical. Read it again: Life is normal and life is clearly full of normal people doing normal things, so it’s working. Normal works because normal is normal and working is normal.