On Tuesday night, the students and surrounding community of the University of South Florida cleared their schedules and opened their ears for a lecture from blogger Brandon Stanton, the creator of the wildly popular "Humans of New York." With the line to get in winding around three floors of the student center, the event was highly anticipated, and Stanton had a large crowd to impress.
Fittingly, as anyone with an audience of well over 600 people would, Stanton walked onto stage in a black hoodie and jeans, appearing as casual as any of the subjects in his photographs.
Oddly enough, it fit.
Stanton started off the lecture by talking about his first time in college. He described someone who “blew off classes, sat in [his] dorm all day and ripped on a bong.” The picture he painted was very different from the young businessman and online content pioneer onstage in front of his audience, the man who had over 17 million people following his Facebook page and the ability to garner over 300,000 likes in less than 12 hours.
Trust me—as someone who creates online content, I can tell you that you have to put in work for those kinds of numbers. There was almost a disconnect between Stanton’s story that he was telling and the knowledge I already had about him. I couldn’t believe that someone who flunked out of the University of Georgia was now someone with three New York Times bestsellers. It sounded like a fairytale.
However, as Stanton continued his lecture, he revealed his secret. And while it wasn’t magical in the mythical sense, with a fairy godmother or a magic spell, it was almost like destiny had a hand in pushing him in the right direction.
Stanton described his most pivotal moment as the first time he took a photograph of people.
He retold the moment casually, with plenty of humor added in; “I didn’t know if it was allowed, to photograph people,” Stanton said. “I mean—kids?! Isn’t that creepy?” At the root of all the jokes, though, was a very important lesson.
“This was my most pivotal moment because when I looked down at the screen after I took that photo, I felt such a sense of pride. I had only been photographing for about a month, but I had just taken a photo that someone who had been photographing for 20 years might not be able to take, because it involved getting over a fear of opening up.”
He paused.
“It’s more important to be different than to be good.”
It was that sentence that took me aback a little. People, especially college students, can easily get swept up in wanting to be the best. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when we get too caught up in being at the top of the class, making the most money or having the highest GPA, even if we’re doing what we love, we can lose sight of why we started doing it in the first place.
Listening to Stanton speak reminded us all of some very important lessons: don’t be afraid to pursue things off the beaten path, put your heart into everything you do and most importantly, don’t waste your life doing things that you think you’re supposed to be doing rather than what you want to be doing. To put it in his words, “Time is the only thing you can’t buy more of. Don’t waste it.”
