Normal behavior slips. Weird behavior sticks.

What’s counterintuitive at first but so obvious later?

Normal behavior slips away from your memory like water down a slide.

Weird behavior sticks like a chewed up piece of gum under a high schooler’s desk.

Thought experiment: Imagine if you could attend your own funeral. After the service, your loved ones head outside for the post-funeral barbeque. What are they talking about?

How you preferred your coffee? How you always paid your taxes on time? How you never missed your biannual teeth cleaning?

Of course not.

Nobody wants to tell (or listen to) stories about your normal, rational, sane behaviors. Those aren’t storyworthy.

So what will your loved ones be talking about as they devour some finger-licking barbeque?

All your abnormal, irrational, insane behaviors. Those are storyworthy.

In other words, your weird quirks that make you uniquely you.

Normal behavior helps you fit in with the tribe. But weird behavior helps you live inside the tribe’s collective memory long after you’re dead and gone.

The weird thing about weird behaviors is that they are easy to recognize in others but not in yourself.

But I still have a few potential conversation starters for my funeral:

1. Remember that one time (and one time only) when he paid for the entire table’s dinner at his wife’s graduation dinner? That cheap bastard never paid for anything!

2. Remember that morbid life calendar he hung up in his closet? And how he would cheerfully walk in once a week and mark an X in that week’s box to signify being closer to his inevitable expiration date? What a freak!

3. Remember how he said he doesn’t believe in marriage? And how he didn’t need the government to confirm his love for someone? That made his wife feel so warm and fuzzy inside!

We’re all born as natural weirdos.

The tragedy is that many of us are convinced that we need to become more normal as we age.

We must fight this invisible pull towards normalcy.

It’s a recipe for being unremarkable, or worse, unmemorable.

Normal is just another word for average. And none of us want to be normies deep down.

So what?

As far as I can tell, one of the keys to living a storyworthy life is to always do the weirdest thing that feels right as Charlie Becker so beautifully points out.

It’s the most reliable way for us to be remembered by those who we want to remember us.

A question I like to ask myself at the end of each day is, “What’s the weirdest thing I did today?”

If nothing comes to mind, it was a wasted day.

Which encourages me to make sure I do something weird tomorrow.

If you’ve ever wondered, as I have, what you’ll be remembered for, ask your loved ones what your weirdest behaviors are (while you’re still alive).

Hopefully they’ve got a laundry list of items.

If not, then please, for the love of all that is holy, let your freak flag fly my friend.

Your thoughts? Criticisms? Complaints? Please leave a comment below.