I’ll answer your question with something that is both the best advice I’ve received, as well as the worst advice I ever got.
The number one advice I’ve received throughout my life is most definitely, “to be yourself.” In every step along the way there were people close to me, or not so close to me, that provided me those two words at some point in my life.
For the longest of time I thought, every time when hearing it, something along the lines of, “I think I am?” Valuable words that seem nakedly obvious.
Yet, in my opinion the advice also lacks a bit of guidance.
It wasn’t until much later that I started to understand the true meaning of these words. Or put it differently: what kind of work it takes in order to truly live life from the inside out.
Amidst deep pressure, amidst painful relationships, amidst creating a piece you alone deeply believe in, to convincing other people of your ideas. Ideas that you only can see and have imagined in your mind that we are thrown back upon ourselves. Moments like that challenge us. People challenge us, and it’s during these moment when it becomes visible whether we’ve done the important life work.
Having done the life work and having found the pieces to the puzzle, the outcome is this: it makes you certain about which things are negotiable. Some things aren’t negotiable. There is this quote from “I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.” It’s underneath that scrutiny when it becomes visible whether we have done the work and it’s that moment in which we can remind ourselves why we are here.
So when it comes to work and to be stubborn on your vision, to be consistent and making time to get from A to B, we have to figure out who we are. It’s great to have an idea, it’s much harder to take the idea to the market and to bed on yourself.
I don’t believe in advertisements, allowing advertisers to bid for readers attention on my platform. I need readers to like the essays. Feedback is valuable. It encourage me to push harder.
I came to conclude that on the one end “Be yourself” perfectly describes the most important question we can answer for ourselves: Who are we and why are we here? Underneath everything great there is this answer that only we can give. On the other hand its a hollow concept that doesn’t give guidance.
So what kind of things aren’t negotiable for you?
It’s only in later life that you realise that a prison comes with not being yourself around the people you wish to build a life with. So that was probably the challenge: to not suck things up so that I could maintain connections with other people in my life, but to be yourself.
The advice I would give a kid today would be: “Be yourself as much as you can.” Some people you’ll lose along the way, but the ones you keep will know the real you.
