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Rare Breed: A
Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous, and Different
by Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger
c.2019, HarperOne
$25.99 / $31.99 Canada
320 pages
Your knees were always scabby and hurt.
Skinned elbows, bloody scratches, dirt, bruises, scuffs,
they were hallmarks of your childhood and you earned every
one of them by playing hard and never ignoring a challenge.
That was then, same thing now – but how to you convert
fearlessness into business acumen? In Rare Breed
by Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger, see how
feistiness can work for you.
Some things don’t make sense.
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For Bonnell and Hansberger, though, dropping out of college
just short of graduation did. Eager for
entrepreneurship, they left their classes behind to start
their branding agency, Motto, and road-tripped to grow it.
For them, despite well-intentioned naysayers and a few
head-hanging bumps along the way, the timing was right; even
so, they’re aware that their success story is unusual.
Bonnell and Hansberger are rebels in business, not
button-down Wall Street types. No, they’re “defiant,
dangerous, and different,” which they use as “selling
points” for clients who want to upend the status quo, and
they embrace this all wholeheartedly. And though they don’t
always like to follow arbitrary rules, there are some
rules of thumb for “rare breeds” like them: daring
entrepreneurs, the authors claim, share seven “Virtues,”
which “are the keys to becoming a Rare Breed.”
Rebelliousness
is what shakes things up. It helps avoid that which is
normal. It ignores some of the rules of etiquette and it
makes people ask “why?” Audacity is what urges an
entrepreneur to try things nobody’s ever done. It’s about
making big change to what’s working, just to make it work
better. Obsession demands perfection from a
business, and it won’t rest until it finds it. Being
Hot-Blooded keeps the intensity high; it’s passion,
times ten. Weirdness is absolutely a “superpower”
that lets you be you, and it shows clients authenticity.
Being Hypnotic beams charisma “that turns heads,” and
being Emotional lets your intuition free to work for
you.
These are things, the authors indicate, that you probably
already own, so why not let them make you successful?
After all, they say, “norms can look cozy and comforting…
but so can a casket.”
For every person who ever dropped out of college, everyone
who never even went, for every serial job-holder with a
won’t-let-go dream, Rare Breed is like an entire wind
storm of fresh air.
And yet – read super-carefully.
Not-so-buried inside their book, authors Sunny Bonnell and
Ashleigh Hansberger offer well-considered downsides to their
seven “Virtues,” and they can’t be ignored. Indeed, despite
that its verbiage is breezy and sometimes hip and flip, this
book demands a fair amount of restraint and maturity from a
reader who wants to put it to use. For the still-unbridled
reader, “Dark Side” portions of the chapters explain in
plain language what could happen if those warnings are
dismissed.
While this book may seem best for Millennials, it’s not for
unripened kids. Anyone with a good head and a rebel streak
will get something from it, though, and if that’s you and
you’re ready for a shake-up, Rare Breed can’t hurt.
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