13 Ideas on Being ‘Cool’

When you are cool you can get away with a lot.  It’s difficult to become “cool” though, most of the time it’s engrained in employees/owners/companies from the very beginning.  Being “cool” can be (and almost always is)  a competitive advantage, just ask Threadless, 22 Fresh, Coda Clothing or Vitamin Water.  It’s developing your own personal social object, your purple cow, your hedgehog strategy.  It’s the reason people both love and hate Howard Stern.  It doesn’t matter what you think of him, he has an element of ‘cool’.

Here are a few ideas on being “cool”.

1. It’s a culture, a natural way of life.
2. It’s being different and sticking to your guns.
3. It’s pissing some people off to make another group happy.
4. It’s that moment when you are unsure if you should do something or not, and you do it anyway.
5. It’s holding a contradictory opinion from everyone else.
6. It’s not listening to the people who put you down, they aren’t the cool ones.
7. It’s making other people extremely happy.
8. It’s going against the grain, not following trends but creating your own.
9. It’s tweaking the norm to make it more enjoyable.
10. It’s taking a seemingly regular event and making it irregular.
11. It’s creating a semantic marker in your audience’s mind.
12. It’s turning the mundane, menial task into an enjoyable thought provoking experience
13. It’s making me smile when I unsubscribe from your e-mail campaign (Hat tip to Groupon for inspiring this post, I unsubscribed from Groupon Vancouver today, in doing so I stumble upon the best experience I have ever had in unsubscribing from an e-mail list)

What’s your definition of “being cool” let me know in the comments below?

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