“Bro, be yourself!”
“Relax — “be yourself”? Really, that’s all you got–?”
“Yeah –“
“That’s crappy advice – I’ll end up jobless, hungry and undisciplined.”
“Be yourself” seems like an empowering piece of advice but if not careful we can think this means to act under our own rules all the time but the world has rules, laws, guidelines, boundaries and each of us play a part.
Shakespeare said it — “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts…”
The alternative is to go ahead stick to the “be yourself” idea… tread carefully.
Say you start with the “I’m gonna do me” idea. You’ll wake up whenever you want and do whatever you want. Sure that may work for a bit but the world is a stage and you gotta play a part.
In the business world they say “the market decides” — Bob Dylan put it nicely in his song “Gotta Serve Somebody” — we all serve somebody… we all serve the market and the market wants something from us even if it means you can’t “be yourself”. It needs you to play a part.
Now… I think we each can know our part and see what aspects of ourselves fit in that particular part.
Only then can we bring that authentic piece of us to the part to move forward and meet the market where it’s at — the world stage.