A Bit of Mischief

In a sea of sameness, a little irreverence might be exactly what helps you stand out.

If you know me at all, even just a little bit, you know I have a hard time ignoring an opportunity for a little mischief.

Not the kind that gets someone arrested, fired, or escorted out of a trade show by security. I'm talking about the kind that raises an eyebrow, challenges an expectation, bends a rule that probably didn't need to exist in the first place, and reminds everyone involved that there are actual human beings in the room. I strongly believe we need more of that.

We live and work in a world that seems determined to reward sameness. We're told to follow best practices, study what successful companies are doing, monitor the competition, use proven formulas, and replicate what works. None of that is inherently bad advice, but follow enough best practices, and you eventually start looking remarkably similar to everyone else following them. That's exactly the point where a bit of mischief is incredibly valuable.

Before going any further, however, let me clear something up: mischief is not the same as disruption.

Honestly, I'm exhausted by disruption. More specifically, I'm exhausted by people proudly proclaiming themselves to be "disruptors." At this point, there are so many self-proclaimed disruptors running around that being disruptive might be the most conventional thing someone can do. I could go on and on about this, but let's get back to the point of this blog:

Mischief, on the other hand, is different because it comes along with a wink and a sly smirk.

It isn't about setting fire to the rulebook just to burn it. By contrast, it's knowing the rules well enough to recognize which ones deserve to be bent. It's asking "Why not?" when everyone else is explaining, "We can't do it that way." It's introducing something unexpected into a place where people have become conditioned to expect the ordinary.

In other words, mischief has personality. And personality is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity in a technology-driven world.

Technology can make us faster, AI can help us write, edit, design, research, analyze, and create, and best practices can help ensure we're doing things the "right" way. All of that can make us incredibly competent. It can also make us blend in and, at the same time, incredibly boring.

That's the sea of sameness I see just about everywhere:

• The perfectly professional website that looks like every other perfectly professional website.

• The carefully constructed social post that could have been written by anyone (and likely was because it was copied and pasted from ChatGPT).

• The sales presentation filled with the same promises every competitor makes.

• The conference where everything runs exactly according to plan, and nobody remembers a damn thing about it two weeks later.

Mischief interrupts that. It's the unexpected email subject line that makes someone laugh, it's the ridiculous name for an otherwise ordinary event, it's recommending something to a client that initially makes them say, "You want us to do WHAT?", and it's having enough confidence in who you are as a brand to occasionally color outside the lines.

None of this means being reckless, offensive, or weird simply for the sake of getting attention. Mischief without purpose is just noise. The kind of mischief I'm talking about is fully intentional because it reveals personality, gives your audience something to actually think about, and, most importantly, makes what you're doing feel unmistakably like you. Candidly, that's increasingly difficult to manufacture.

Success will always require discipline, consistency, hard work, sacrifice, and plenty of other decidedly unsexy things. But discipline without personality can quickly become predictability, and predictability is where brands get permanently placed in the "Where are they now?" file.

The bottom line is that I'm not suggesting you start breaking rules just to see what happens. What I am suggesting, however, is that professionalism doesn't require us to sand away every interesting edge until we're perfectly polished and completely indistinguishable from everyone and everything else.

In a world working overtime to make everything look, sound, and feel the same, perhaps a little mischief isn't something we need to grow out of. In fact, I think it's something we need to get better at.