Today's Challenge:
We live in a society of advice columns, experts and make-over shows. Without even knowing it, you can begin to believe someone knows better than you how to live your life. Someone might know a particular something better – like how to bake a three-layer molten coconut chocolate cake or how to build a website – but nobody else on the planet knows how to live your life better than you. (Although one or two people may think they do.) For today, trying asking yourself often, especially before you make a choice, "What do I know about this?"
Today's entry:
I was born fiercely independent, and while I gravitate easily to the message of radical nonconformity, I've also come very close to colliding with it. I've found that navigating your own ego against the demands of the world is a balancing act – both forces can destroy you.
When I started my own business 5 years ago, I was hardly naive. I was 36, I had a Ph.D., I had helped build and run a successful start-up, and I had a wide skill-set. So, I embraced my stubborn individuality and set out to do it all my way. I paid lip service to asking people for advice, but I didn't really pay attention to them.
There was one problem: my way didn't work.
So, I choked down an unchewed chunk of my pride and I started to listen – not just to people's advice, but to their actions and results. I struggled to stop envying people's successes and to start learning from them. Even if everything they were doing wasn't right, and if some people were mostly lucky, I realized there were bits of truth out there.
I had to give up some of the ideas I clung to the tightest, but I realized that many of those ideas weren't essential to who I am – they were just habits. Ironically, "my" ideas were often just things other people passed down to me so long ago that I had forgotten. In essence, I realized I was fighting other people's ideas with other people's ideas.
Was everyone else always right? Of course not. I challenged the ideas that came my way, and I put them to the test. I held them up to the light along with my own treasured preconceptions, until I could see clearly which ones shone the brightest.
I let go of some of what I thought was uniquely me, only to discover that what was left was a lot more authentic. I learned to listen critically, but not cynically, because I think that filtering out the 90% of bad advice that comes my way is better than wholesale rejecting all of it and missing the 10% that could make my life better.
Of course, no one else can live my life, and I absolutely believe in carving my own path. For all my glimmers of uniqueness, though, I also know that I share a biology, a culture, and a point in space and time with billions of others, and it's a dangerous conceit to believe that I can't learn from them. Being unconventional doesn't mean rejecting all wisdom.