“Today I will do what others won’t, so tomorrow I can do what others can’t.” This quote by Jerry Rice describes an ideal of how to become successful, and that success will not always come from solely determination and hard work, but also from taking uncommon actions on situations in a given community. I believe that a person could knowingly be a positive deviant and become successful by not doing what is ordinary, but being that extra in extraordinary.

A positive deviant is someone whose uncommon but successful behaviors or strategies enable him or her to a better result to a challenge facing an entire group of people. If there is a vast group of similar people, all going for the same goal, and they are all trying to achieve it the same way, the chances of achieving that goal from within that group of people become slim. For example, applying to colleges. Let’s say that I am a student with a 3.6 GPA and an ACT score of 28 who has made it to an interview with a representative from University of Illinois. And let’s say that my scores may be a good enough standard, but not exceptional. I am amongst hundreds of other students being interviewed today also, many of which have the exact same grade point average and ACT scores as me. All of these students approach the interviews in similar ways. They just prepare to answer interview questions in intellectual ways, and try to charm their way into the school. From the perspective of a positive deviant, he or she will see that in his or her situation, the chances of getting into the school with the same approach as the others are slight. That the results have no reason to differ from any other student being interviewed in my similar situation.

If you keep what you are doing, you will keep getting what you are getting. So as a positive deviant, I have to change my actions so that I can make myself stand out, and have an outcome of being accepted. An idea to make that happen would be something I learned from my camp, and that is to create a brag-book. A binder of a collection of my achievements, in and out of the academic standards, to prove that I am a different individual from all these other 3.6 GPA students, and worthy of the acceptance into the school. Not everyone would think of doing such a thing, because of the risk of being embarrassed if he or she is not accepted. But just as Jerry Rice said, if I do something that others will not do now, then in the future I can do what others cannot do.

That similar idea was presented in the book, Better, when Atul Gawande talks about the malnourished children in villages that have poverty. Some of the mothers in the poverty were “breaking the locally accepted” ways by feeding their children throughout the day even when the kids had diarrhea, and feeding them food that is considered low class. They would do all that to prevent the children from being half-starved. When a nutritionist, who runs an anti-starvation program, discovered these ways of the mothers, they spread the word to the rest of the village and they were able to decrease the amount of unhealthy children by about 65 to 85 percent. Those mothers saw that the normal ways were not helping the problem of the sick children, so they did what others won’t do and they ended up keeping their children well nourished. The outcomes of those positive deviant mothers helped create a healthier village. That great success, in the end, was not only for the mothers but also for an entire village.

Whether it is to be accepted into colleges, or for the sake of a child’s health, being a positive deviant can be a choice. And when one chooses to be a positive deviant, it is great tactic to achieve success. So one can either be building their future, or help their village become healthy, the choice is yours to change up the normal.