Taylor, the Czech Republic missionary, had a very different metaphor for the church and its missions than the McDonald’s analogy Alex came up with: “It’s like walking through a rose garden. You can feel the thorns, but when you look back, all you can see is the roses,” he told me. But his recollection of what it was like to be the only religious person in a den of unbelievers was strikingly similar to Alex’s. “When you’re the odd man out,” Taylor said, “you have to decide what you believe.”

The mission experience made Taylor more dedicated to Mormonism, while it made Alex more dedicated to getting out. Being bombarded with so much antagonism and rejection forced them to look inward and determine what, precisely, animated their spirits. In both cases, being the weird ones helped them uncover what was true about them all along.

Julia, Part II

While Julia Landauer, the NASCAR racer, was still a student at Stanford, she appeared on the TV show Survivor. Within days of arriving in the Caramoan Islands of the Philippines, she developed a sunburn so severe that a huge blister formed on her cheek. When she lay down, she could feel the liquid inside it sloshing from side to side. She got her period for fifteen days straight and lost twelve pounds.

She worried the other contestants would resent her if she revealed that she was a Stanford student, so she tried not to talk much and, in the process, developed a reputation among the other contestants as cagey and too quiet.

One night while I was visiting her, I watched clips of Julia on the show on YouTube. She was voted off seventh, so she had very little total screen time. It consisted mainly of adult contestants picking apart Julia, a rail-thin twenty-one-year-old in pigtails.

“She’s really boring. She genuinely does not contribute anything except a nasally voice,” one contestant said. One man sat Julia down and issued her a long series of manipulative-seeming instructions on how to play the game, to which Julia responded simply, “Understood.” Another said he would describe Julia as having a “vanilla” personality—“but that would be a great disservice to the flavor vanilla.”

The next day, I told her that if someone had said something like that about me on TV when I was that age, I would still be beneath the rock I would have crawled under to die.

“There’s only so much you can do about it,” she said briskly. “He knew how to play the game.”

Not long after Survivor, Julia volunteered to be a “case study” in a Stanford consulting class. The other students formed a “U” shape around her and critiqued her “brand.”

“My feedback is you’re too polished, you’re not relatable,” she remembers them saying. “We don’t get who you are.”