Are you in the minority or majority?

Hey, I hope you had a good week.

It’s been an intense start to the year for me with work but getting a hang of it little by little.

Trying to take more pictures this year and document a lot more cos I suck at it currently. Here’s a selfie of me as I write this sentence.

Stay self-aware. Find joy in your small wins. Stay Jiggy.

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Conformity is a fascinating phenomenon.

We very much like to think of ourselves as unique. We take pride in the fact that we can decide the things we want to do. We don’t think with the crowd. We have our own opinions and stick to them.

Yet, we all conform in different areas of our life. You greet someone when you meet because it's the right thing to do. You shake with your right hand. Your fashion style is based on a 'look' you identify with. You believe in a certain religion or not.

“Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behaviour in order to fit in with a group.”

As social beings, we would very likely always belong to groups. The difference is that sometimes our group is the majority and in other instances, we’ll be in the minority.

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I guess the question then is:

In what areas of life should we be intentional about being in the minority versus the majority?

There’s often a misconception that the majority shapes the world. That the power is in the numbers. I very much believe this to be untrue and history backs it up. The power is often with the minority. The minority influences the majority till they conform to their new ideas.

Obviously, the minority doesn't always succeed and in some instances, it'll take time. At the end of the day, most 'new' things were created by a minority.

Think about fashion and the influencer-centric world we live in. I remember a couple of years ago that boot-cut jeans were a trend and it was the in-thing to wear. Then it switched to skinny jeans. Skinny jeans are going out of fashion now and free-flowing wear is the new wave.

Is it the majority that creates these waves?

One of the best examples of how and why we conform was described by Solomon Asch in 1951. In his experiment, he put a group of people in a room and asked them to state which of the lines he showed on a paper were correct.

The catch is that 4 of the 5 people were not 'real participants'. They had been told to stay a wrong answer and the real participant had no idea. Here’s what the experiment looked like.

At least 75% of people conformed once during the experiment. On average, 32% (one-third) of the participants conformed with the incorrect majority.

Conformity is bound to happen. The question will be: In which areas do we want to belong to the minority and in which are we okay with being in the majority.

“Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.” - Søren Kierkegaard

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Personally, for things that don’t matter to me, I don’t mind being in the majority. For things that are important to my sense of purpose, my happiness, my comfort and my fulfilment in life, I prefer to go with the minority that I align with.

Something I’ll love to explore in some future letters is to share stories of how a lot of the “norms”, “tools”, “institutions”, “resources”, “platforms” that play a major role in our lives were created by a minority.

If you want to truly make change happen in an area of life, assess if you’re in the majority or minority. More often than not, the minority will become the majority with time.

This letter was written without listening to music but you should listen to this mix by one of my new favourite artists. The Wavy Creator.

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“The most common form of despair is not being who you are”. - Søren Kierkegaard

Love always.

Francis.