Today's Challenge:
Write down in which areas of your life you have to overcome these suicidal tendencies of imitation, and how you can transform them into a newborn you – one that doesn't hide its uniqueness, but thrives on it. There is a "divine idea which each of us represents" – which is yours?
Today's entry:
Today, I'd like to stop imitating my daughter. I think I caught her cold.
Life requires imitation, to a certain extent. If I decided not to conform to the bourgeois ideals of breathing, eating and drinking, my uniqueness would be short-lived at best. Even as a blogger, I find that I consciously choose to imitate people at times. It's a balancing act – how do you learn from the people you admire while still keeping your own voice?
I heard Jon Morrow from CopyBlogger admit in a recent podcast that he used to take posts from authors he admired and copy them word for word, just to burn their style into his brain. I'm not sure if I'd go to that extreme, but I see the method to his madness. Especially with writing, the nuance of what separates good from great can be hard to pin down – imitation becomes a way to train our minds.
Maybe I need to read the question again.
I think my point is that some forms of imitation are unavoidable. The trick is to separate the useful lessons of the past from the dogma of social habit. What does everyone do because it makes sense, and what does everyone do because they've "always done it that way"?
Work habits are a big one for me. Why do we Americans work 5 day work-weeks of 8 hours each (or, more realistically, 10 hours each)? I honestly have no idea. Ok, I just looked it up – the 40-hour work-week was invented by the US government in 1938. Apparently, it was meant to help workers, establishing standards for overtime pay.
Fast forward 70 years, and it's just the way of things. We don't ask why.
I suspect that the 40-hour week caught on for the usual reasons – more habit than conspiracy. Still, you wonder how something that impacts our lives so profoundly is rarely questioned (not counting Tim Ferriss).
When my daughter was born, I was already running my own business from home. I knew that, at least for a while, I'd have to get my work done in something closer to 6-hour days. I was worried – how was I going to lose 10 hours of my work-week when I already felt stressed out most of the time?
Once it was a necessity, I found that a 30-hour week suddenly became achievable. I had to focus more, prioritize better, and cut back on Angry Birds, but the work got done. In many ways, my work improved. I'm not saying that I could progress to a 20-hour week, then 10, etc., but there was nothing magical about the number 40. It's just an idea that some government official once put on paper.