Column

If people don’t laugh at you and your ideas at least once a week, you’re not pushing the envelope. There, I said it. Needed to. I’m tired of seeing boring businesses and people afraid to take the road less travelled. Most of the things that fill us with fear never happen, so why let them keep you small?

Great people run toward their resistances. And great companies spend far less time benchmarking others than creating new ways of delivering outrageous value to their customers. Why? Because the world doesn’t need a better clone.

The world needs more people and enterprises that make us say wow. The world needs more giant ideas that no one’s thought of to enrich our customers, improve our communities and elevate the planet. The world needs more visionaries, dreamers and outright revolutionaries.

I love what Tom Chappel, founder of Tom’s of Maine, said: “Success means never letting the competition define you. Instead, you have to define yourself based on a point of view you care deeply about.” BeautifulOne client recently shared that he thought it was daring for me and my team to have a picture on our rebranded website of me with my eyes closed, holding a dove.

“What would all your corporate clients like Microsoft, IBM, Nike think of it?” he asked. “Those companies stand for innovation,” I replied. “I think they’d applaud the bold move.”

The designer of the new multimedia show I’m running at my presentations shared that the colours I’d chosen were risky because they weren’t “standard corporate colours.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” I joked. Business needs more daring. It needs more people willing to take risks. Business needs more people like Richard Branson and his devotion to putting tourists into space with his company Virgin Galactic. I love people like that. They inspire me.

All innovations are initially laughed at. Just the way it is. They laughed at Columbus when he said the earth was round. They laughed at the Wright Brothers, who vowed a human being could fly. They laughed at the guys at RIM when they launched the BlackBerry. They laughed at the founder of Evian, who believed people would pay more for water. Whose laughing now? I guess the universe really does favour the brave.

People pay for originality (big idea there). Be different. Let them laugh. Let them call you crazy. Let them snicker.

—Robin Sharma is the author of The Greatness Guide (Jaico)