There are two truths I want you to hold at once. The first truth is that you have no time to waste being someone you’re not. I recently interviewed this young entrepreneur named Nicolas Kirkland, and he said something that stuck with me — “Why do you gotta act like everybody else? Everybody else is taken.”
We’re either on the hamster wheel of trying to fit in or we’ve slipped into the sinkhole of mistaking someone else’s dream for our own.
Related note: One of my absolute favorite musical tunes is “From Now On” performed by Hugh Jackman in The Greatest Showman. He lets his father-in-law and insecurity about growing up poor corrupt his ambitions, and he quickly finds himself living the life of a two-faced businessman. Somehow he lost touch with who he was at the start. But it wasn’t too late to turn things around.
BTW the Zac Brown Band does an A+ cover of this song I highly recommend.
“The politicians praised my name. But those are someone else’s dreams, the pitfalls of the man I became. For years and years, I chased their cheers, at the crazy speed of always needing more.”
The second truth is that you can also become the person you want to be by simply playing the part. You can call it “fake it to make it” or couch it in that old saying, “dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”
These truths could be mistaken for a contradiction, one demanding authenticity and another promoting inauthenticity, but it all depends on how honest you’re being with yourself about who you’re meant to be. None of us come into the world born the way we’d like to eventually leave the world. We are in a process of becoming. The trick is becoming the person you want to see in the mirror till your final days, and doing that work for yourself…not someone else.
I hope you enjoy this video for Geeky Stoics subscribers. Leave a comment with your thoughts and share with a friend.
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