The Outside Edge: How Outsiders Can Succeed in a World Made by Insiders

Robert Kelsey's internationally bestselling self-help books have helped tens of thousands of people overcome fear of failure and under confidence. Now Robert is back and is here to debunk the ever pervasive myths around the trail-blazing rebel outsider....

Our culture celebrates outsiders while – in reality – slamming the door in their face. The modern world craves innovation while alienating original thinkers. It encourages creativity while shutting-out all but a privileged few from individualistic expression. What a waste!

Yet achieving great things as a genuine outsider is possible. Outsiders can find their own way – succeeding without compromising their individuality. They just need to forge an edge.

The Outside Edge is all about learning to harness the unique vantage point you possess in order to give yourself the edge required to succeed. It will show you when to embrace your outsider status and go against convention, and when to play the game, do as the insiders do and make sure you can get progress. Think of The Outside Edge as a manual for positively directing your insecurity, awkwardness and role-confusion – towards a meaningful future, shaped and pursued on your own terms.

By getting The Outside Edge you can:

• Identity and understand the causes of feeling like an "outsider"
• Accept yourself while focusing on "finding meaning" for your life
• Motivate yourself using strong goals, often harnessing creativity
• Acquire the skills needed to succeed on your own terms
• Avoid pitfalls such as poor judgement, negativity and extremism.

About the Author

Robert Kelsey is a best-selling author, occasional speaker, and the owner and CEO of a successful financial PR agency in the City of London. His series of books on the insecurities that made him such an ineffective young adult have sold over 100,000 copies and have been translated into 10 languages. Yet Robert has always felt like an outsider. This is largely due to the tribal dislocation of his childhood – his parents being part of the post-war East London Diaspora to rural Essex: ‘townies marooned in the countryside’ as he describes it. But it was also due to a low self-esteem generated from family strains as well as the biological constraints of his late onset adolescence.

Yet, once ingrained, the notion of being an outsider has never left him. Whether as the sensitive youngster in the macho world of the building industry; the ‘mature’ student among the teenage undergraduates at university; the state-educated rough-diamond among the privately-educated sophisticates of the publishing industry; or the deep-thinker among the deal-junkies of investment banking, Robert has always been a fish out of water.

And far from an enabling outlook – as many commentators on the phenomenon of outsidership love to preach – such a skewed viewpoint has been incredibly disabling. Sensitivity, paranoia, reactivity and anger have been constant companions during Robert’s sometimes quixotic quests: often generating self-fulfilling behaviours that have, indeed, confirmed his outsider status.

Even as a mature adult having returned to his tribal ancestral ‘homelands’ (Hackney, to be precise), Robert is the one among the many. Alone in the crowd, he’s irritated by hipsters opening clubs he cannot join, yet is also abused for being a middle-class interloper, polluting this rejectionists’ bohemian enclave.

The Outside Edge is Robert’s fifth book, and the fourth in his series exploring his own failings. His view is that ‘smart people’ can be disabled by their insecurities, far more than many realize. Yet they also have it within them to overcome such barriers and make progress anyway – having understood the issues and accepted who they are. While being ‘cured’ is, in his view, a false promise made to desperate people, understanding and acceptance are the first steps to generating objectives, plans and strategies that take both the sufferer, and their mental baggage, to a better place.

Robert’s aim is not to turn the outsider into an insider – a solution that’s probably impossible anyway (with much blood, sweat and tears expended in the effort). Instead, he intends to help people lose the disablement of being an outsider by generating their own path – one that both offers meaning and helps forge their unique edge. After all – having exhausted all the alternatives – that’s exactly what he did.