You can just stand out

3 Thoughts

I.

People are strange.

They’ll love their minds over a delayed train. Snap over a slow barista. Let a spilled coffee ruin their day.

But when it comes to the big stuff…

Staying in the wrong job. Letting their dreams die quietly. Wasting years on autopilot. Nothing. No urgency. No reaction.

We treat small problems like emergencies, and real emergencies like background noise.

Why do we do that?

II.

If you couldn’t say “I love you,” would they still feel your love?

Would they feel presence, patience, and care Or would they feel distance, distraction, and detachment?

Anyone can say words. Few show them with their actions.

III.

No half-measures.

If you’re going to chase a dream, chase it like your life depends on it. If you’re going to love, love with your whole heart. If you’re going to show up, show up all the way.

Most people tiptoe through life. One foot in, one foot out. Afraid to fail. Afraid to feel. Afraid to lose.

But the real risk isn’t trying and failing. It’s playing it safe and never feeling alive.

2 Quotes

I.

Investor and author Morgan Housel on how to read books:

"Memorize stories. Highlight facts. Skip the fluff."

II.

Author Mark Mason on focus:

“Social media says: do everything, everywhere, all at once.

Reality says: focus on doing one or two things extremely well, in one place, consistently, over a long period of time.”

1 Game-Changing Idea: The Zebra & The Red Dot

A group of researchers once set out to study zebras in the wild.

They ran into a problem: zebras all look the same. Their stripes blur together, especially in a moving herd. It was almost impossible to track one specific zebra over time.

So they came up with a solution: they painted a small red dot on a few zebras’ backs.

It worked... at first.

But over the next few months, they noticed something strange.

The zebras with red dots kept turning up dead.

Lions were eating them. But that didn’t make sense. Lions are supposed to hunt the weak, the sick, the old. Not the young and healthy.

Then the researchers realized something important.

Lions don’t always hunt the weakest.
They hunt what they can isolate. What they can track.

The red dot made that easy.

It gave the lion a single focal point. In a blur of black and white, one target stood out.

—

That story is usually told as a warning against standing out.

But I don’t think the lesson is “blend in.” I think the lesson is that our brains still treat visibility as danger, even when it isn’t.

We act like being seen is risky. Like putting ourselves out there will lead to something bad. But in modern life, that danger is almost never real.

The instinct makes sense. For most of human history, survival meant staying part of the group. If you strayed too far from the fire, you were on your own. And if you were on your own, you probably didn’t last long.

So we carry that psychological wiring into rooms where it no longer applies.

We hesitate to post online. We hold back ideas in meetings. We filter ourselves so carefully that eventually we forget what we were trying to say in the first place.

And we tell ourselves it’s strategy. That we’re being thoughtful. But a lot of the time, it’s just fear camouflaged as caution.

The truth is, no one’s hunting you.

Until next week,
Jay “You’re Allowed To Stand Out” Yang

Ps. A reminder

Author copies came in for my upcoming book. Childhood dream unfolding 🥲

You’ll be able to grab your copy soon!

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