Being a Rebel Doesn’t Always Mean Shouting

By Sunny Bonnell

Over our years studying great leaders and seminal geniuses, we’ve run into plenty of people who embody common entrepreneur stereotypes. There’s the abrasive, sharp-tongued wunderkind with a sky-high IQ and no tact, who pisses everyone off even as they’re admiring his brilliance. There’s the charismatic charmer who could talk a rabbit into tiger cage but who often stays dangerously close to manipulation, especially when it comes to convincing people to part with their money. And then there’s the spit-in-your-face rebel who isn’t happy unless she’s slamming her bootheel into the accepted way of doing something until it breaks, cackling all the way.

There are plenty of people who fit those stereotypes; that’s how they became stereotypes in the first place. But it bothers us when people think that behaving according to those stereotypes is the only way you can be a Rare Breed. We’ve encountered people who believe that being audacious (one of the Rare Breed Virtues) means thumbing your nose at risk, being personally outrageous in how you dress and what you say, and being willing to jump off a cliff at a moment’s notice.

That’s a problem. When we’ve spoken at conferences about the concept of Rare Breed, young people in the audience have broken out in tears of relief when we told them that there’s no one way to be dangerous, defiant, and different. They felt so much pressure to conform to the stereotypes, and that if they couldn’t, they were condemned to live ordinary lives and never pursue their dreams! That’s heartbreaking and completely unnecessary.

Being a Rare Breed is not about your packaging. It’s about your passion, your actions, and how you show up. There are a million ways to do that, and to illustrate, let us introduce you to Seattle’s quiet rebels.

Ever hear of Icertis, Auth0, and Convoy? Probably not. But they’re players in the Seattle startup scene — in fact, they’ve reached elusive unicorn status: privately held companies with valuations upward of one billion dollars. The reason you haven’t heard about them is that they haven’t filed splashy, ultimately disastrous IPOs like Uber, WeWork, Lyft and Peloton. The leaders of these young companies are rebelling against the “An IPO is the Holy Grail!” ethos of the startup world and staying boring and profitable. For the most part, these quiet rebels aren’t interested in the titanic expectations and baggage that come with going public, defying decades of stereotypes. As Icertis CEO Samir Bodas said in an interview with GeekWire,

“I’m not entirely sure why you would go public and take on all this compliance and SEC and quarterly pressure — man, it’s such a pain in the ass. To be public is hard. If capital is available to me without the pain, I’ll take capital over the pain and capital, any day.”

Area startups like used goods marketplace OfferUp, pet sitting startup Rover and remittance company Remitly, are following the same path: staying private longer or swearing off the IPO altogether. As a result, they fly below the radar. They’re not nationally known. They don’t swagger, get glossy magazine profiles written about them, give TED talks or boast about leading lifestyle movements. That doesn’t make them any less rebellious, though.

That’s the takeaway here.

You might be shy, taciturn, or terrified of speaking in front of a group of people, and if you are, you may think that those traits disqualify you from being a disruptive, innovative leader. Maybe you’ve spent years worrying that the only way to be part of the club is to be volatile and mercurial, to leave a trail of bruised egos as you swim like a shark through the ranks of the less hardy and unworthy.

Pardon us, but that’s crap.

There are a lot of ways to rebel, and all of them are about the end result, not how you look getting to that result. If you think the status quo needs to change, you’re a rebel. If you find small but effective ways to push back against waste, stupidity, or injustice, you’re a rebel. If bringing about change is more important than you feeling good about yourself…well, you get the point. How can you make that work for you within a company? Glad you asked:

• Choose substance over style. Whether you’re a rank-and-file employee, a manager, or an executive, it’s a universal truth that going out of your way to look or act provocatively will get you more eye rolls than respect. If you have an outsized ego, that’s okay; a lot of super smart and talented people do. But keep a lid on it and let your performance speak for itself.
• Bring solutions, not just complaints. It’s fine to find fault with a business model, a product, the company culture, your industry, whatever. But you’ll get a much better reception if, when you show up to rail against what’s broken, you’ve also got a way to fix it in mind. Let’s face it, your peers or superiors already know what doesn’t work as well as you do, so going negative will just frustrate them. Instead, be the one with the substantive, real-world solution.
• Build alliances. You’re probably not the only one who’s aware that the conventional wisdom in your field doesn’t make sense. Find the others who feel the same way you do, encourage them to share their thoughts with you, incorporate their ideas into your solution, and be the one who speaks up if they won’t. But be sure to give everyone credit.

Talking about the quietly rebellious or the moderately obsessive might seem like a contradiction, but it’s not. It reflects reality: being a Rare Breed is about your spirit and character, not about the degree to which people outside your immediate circle are aware of your awesomeness. You do you and eventually, a lot more folks will know who you are.

We’re Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger, authors of Rare Breed: A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous, and Different (HarperOne), hosts, and executive producers. We’re also the co-founders of the award-winning branding agency Motto. Learn more about us and our book at www.rarebreedbook.com.

© Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger 2020