Don't Be Afraid to Stand Out: A Lesson from the ATM Queue

Most times, we feel the right thing to do is to follow the crowd, as it gives us a feeling of belonging, but what we fail to know is that sometimes it saves a lot of time and effort if we choose to stand out and do something different from what everybody else is doing.

Yesterday, after waking up and refreshing myself, I planned on going to the ATM machine to collect some money so that I could get some foodstuffs at home, as I had nothing left. It was not a long walk from home, so I left immediately.

After I got to the ATM, I found a lot of people in the queue. I was like, When would I leave here or should I consider going to the POS machine? But I would pay them to collect the cash I need.

I looked through the ATM lobby and found out that there were five ATM machines, but people only queued at three of them. There were about 30 people when I arrived there, so my thought was that if this many people were on only 3 machines, this meant the other machines would not be dispensing.

I didn't want to jump to conclusions, and I felt that it would not take away anything from me if I gave it a try. As I entered the lobby and went straight to one of the unused ATM machines, I took out my ATM card, placed it into the machine, and typed in the money I needed from it.

To my surprise, the ATM was dispensing, and everyone turned and looked at me with a kind of look. Someone even said aloud that this one that just came here has dispensed money. I was just laughing within me as people ran to my back, waiting to use the machine as I was done.

I don't know how many minutes they would have been in the queue, but from the look I got, it would have been longer than 10–20 minutes. It then came to my mind that if I had never thought of giving it a try, if I had just assumed like everyone else or had just followed the crowd and chosen not to use the ATM that was not in use by anybody, I would have spent a much longer time in the lobby in a queue.

From this occurrence, I picked the following moral lessons:

The answer is always no, until you ask. Don't make assumptions.

It would save you time and effort if you stood out and did things differently
from what the crowd was doing.

What other lessons could you pick?

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This post I just wrote has inspired to write next on this topic:

"Don't Follow the Herd: How to Get Ahead by Doing Things Differently"

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𝙰𝙱𝙾𝚄𝚃 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙰𝚄𝚃𝙷𝙾𝚁

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_{Starstrings01, also known as Giftedhands, attends the Federal University of Agriculture in Abeokuta to study mechatronics engineering. He is a lover of the hive, a guitarist from Nigeria, and a student.}

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