How to stand out in a crowd

A few months ago, a young woman, to whom I was connected, started appearing regularly in my LinkedIn feed. I’d never met her and had never really noticed her before – but suddenly, she was hard to miss. Partly because she was looking for work. Mostly because she was doing it dressed as a cow.

She had a background in marketing and was documenting her search with an openness that drew me in. She talked about applications, interviews, disappointments and the anxiety of waiting for something to happen. There was humour, but she also let people see how difficult she was finding it. Before long, I was following her progress and hoping (along with many others, I’m sure) that she would get the break she was looking for.

The cow onesie started with a video application for a job at a business connected with farming. In the video, she switched between business clothes and the cow outfit and shared it on LinkedIn where it attracted more than 50,000 views.

She didn’t get the job, but instead of abandoning the idea, she found another use for it: running ten kilometres in the onesie for charity, raising more than $1,600. That attracted still more attention – so she kept developing the idea. The cow appeared in different situations as she continued telling her story. It suited her humour and the sort of memorable marketing she wanted to do. By the end of a 138-day search, her posts had accumulated 1.9 million views and she’d secured a role combining sales and national marketing at a logistics business.

I was genuinely thrilled for her and I suspect that a great many of the people who’d followed her journey felt the same way. We’d watched her deal with rejection, pick herself up and keep going, and we wanted her to succeed.

It’s also worth noting that the warmth I felt towards her has extended to the people she now works for. A business I’d never heard of has become familiar to me entirely through her work – so it also turns out to have been a clever commercial move on their part.

So, what’s the lesson from this? Should we all buy cow onesies and start posting pictures of ourselves on LinkedIn? One look at the image accompanying this article should settle that question. Some of us are suited to such approaches ….. and some are not.

But there are plenty of lessons we can learn from her. That she kept going when things were difficult. That she was willing to try something different, learn from what failed and develop what worked. And most of all, that she found a way to bring HER own personality into what she was doing. The costume was memorable because of the person wearing it.

I could copy her photographs and her outfit, but I couldn’t reproduce her particular combination of humour, experience and circumstances. Trying to do so would leave me following somebody else’s success while overlooking what I might have to offer myself.

It’s a lesson others have learned in very different fields.

Early in the late Dolly Parton’s career, the respected musician and record executive Chet Atkins suggested that her extravagant appearance could hold her back. She admired him, but the big hair and flamboyant clothes suited her personality, so she kept them. Her talent did the work, but she had the confidence to present it as Dolly.

Dick Fosbury found his own way in a more literal sense. As a young high jumper, he struggled with the accepted technique of going over the bar face down. Through experimentation, he developed a way of clearing it backwards. In 1968, he won Olympic gold, and the Fosbury Flop eventually became the standard technique. An approach that looked peculiar turned out to be extraordinarily effective.

Then there’s James Dyson, who became frustrated with a vacuum cleaner that lost suction as its bag clogged. He saw cyclone technology separating sawdust from air at a sawmill and wondered whether he could apply the principle at home. Developing his vacuum cleaner took 5,127 prototypes, and major manufacturers rejected his design. But he kept refining it and eventually brought it to market himself.

There’s nothing wrong with learning from other people. Dyson did exactly that when he borrowed an idea from a sawmill, and generations of high jumpers have benefited from Fosbury’s discovery. But each of these people also brought something of their own to the task. They understood their abilities, questioned what wasn’t working and had the courage to pursue a different approach.

There’s an older example of this that takes the lesson much further.

Before he became king, David volunteered to face Goliath when the experienced soldiers around him were too frightened to do so. King Saul equipped him with armour and a sword, giving him what a soldier would normally wear into battle. David tried moving in it and realised that he couldn’t go forward with equipment he hadn’t learned to use. He took it off.

Instead, he chose five smooth stones and went out with his sling. As a shepherd, he’d already defended his flock against dangerous animals. He knew the skills he had developed, and he trusted the God who had delivered him before to deliver him again. First Samuel 17 records both his practical experience and his faith.

David didn’t need to become Saul to do what God had called him to do. Wearing the king’s armour would have made him look more like a conventional soldier, but it would have hindered the abilities he actually possessed.

How often do we do something similar? We look at somebody whose life seems successful and try to put on their armour. We adopt their manner, follow their formula and measure ourselves against their achievements. Meanwhile, the abilities God has given us sit unused because we’re too busy trying to become somebody else.

There are more than eight billion people on this planet, yet nobody else has your complete combination of personality, experience, abilities and relationships. Even identical twins, who share essentially the same genetic starting point, live distinct lives. Each becomes a person with experiences and choices of their own.

Consider how your life began. Among the millions of possibilities involved in conception, one particular contribution from your father joined with one particular contribution from your mother, and your life began. We sometimes describe that as winning the greatest race of our lives before we were even born. It’s a metaphor rather than an exact description of the biology, but it captures something extraordinary about being here at all.

And Scripture takes us beyond that sense of wonder into something deeply personal. Psalm 139 describes God forming us in the womb and declares that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”. We’re known by our Creator from our very beginning.

Jesus makes that care wonderfully concrete in Matthew 10, telling His followers that even the hairs of their heads are numbered. God’s knowledge of us reaches into details we barely notice ourselves. Our relationship with Him is personal. He knows the individual behind the face, including the fears and hopes we hide from everybody else.

That matters particularly when life has gone badly. Someone who’s unemployed after repeated rejection can begin to feel they have nothing to offer. Others find themselves homeless, broken or so overwhelmed that they can’t imagine a worthwhile future. Sometimes that despair reaches the point where they consider ending their lives. The circumstances behind those experiences vary, but losing a sense of worth and hope can deepen the struggle terribly.

We shouldn’t dismiss that pain. We should also challenge the conclusion that disappointment, failure or other people’s indifference proves a life has no value. A person can lose sight of their worth without losing that worth in God’s eyes.

Recognising it can give them a reason to seek help, try again and begin discovering what they still have to offer. They may need practical support as well as encouragement, but hope gives them something to move towards.

Ephesians 2:10 describes us as God’s handiwork, created in Christ for good works He has prepared for us. That gives our individuality a purpose. The gifts we’ve been given can serve other people, whether they lead to a public achievement, a quieter contribution or an act of kindness that nobody else ever hears about.

Jesus calls us into a relationship in which our value doesn’t have to be earned by outdoing somebody else. He knows us as we are, calls us to follow Him and changes the way we understand both ourselves and the lives we’ve been given.

The young woman I noticed on LinkedIn found an inventive way to show people what she could do. Her example is worth learning from. But the answer for the rest of us begins with recognising what God has entrusted to us, and asking how we can put it to work.

David took off Saul’s armour, picked up the tools he knew and trusted God with what came next. We can begin with the same confidence: the person God made us to be has something to offer. We don’t have to spend our lives trying to wear somebody else’s armour.

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