Be What You Is, Cuz If You Be What You Ain’t…
The award-winning writer and filmmaker Phil Cousineau once took a cross-country motorcycle trip, weaving his way through the diverse landscapes of the United States. At the Boothill Cemetery in the historic town of Tombstone, Arizona, Cousineau was struck by an epitaph on one of the tombstones: “Be what you is, cuz if you be what you ain’t, then you ain’t what you is.” A few years later, over a glass of wine with one of his mentors, Joseph Campbell (best known for his work on comparative mythology and the concept of the hero’s journey), Cousineau told Campbell about the epitaph. “That’s it!” Campbell said. That cuts right to the core of the hero’s journey, he said. “That’s what it’s all about…That’s just marvelous! Now, how did that go? ‘Be what you is…’” Being what you is—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Kind of Thing That’s Like A Drug
In 2016, Pharrell Williams visited an N.Y.U. music production class to critique student songs. After he listened to a song called “Alaska” by a student named Maggie Rogers, he said, “Wow. I have zero, zero, zero notes for that.” “And I’ll tell you why,” he said. “Because you’re doing your own thing. It’s singular. And that is such a special quality, and all of us possess that ability. ” He analogized it to when the Wu-Tang Clan came out—“no one could really judge it. You either liked it or you didn’t, but you couldn’t compare it to anything else…I’ve never heard anyone like you before, and I’ve never heard anything that sounds like that, so that is the kind of thing that’s like a drug for me.”
The Source of Your Power
I recently wrote about the car ride with Robert Greene during which he asked me about working for Ryan Holiday. I love it, I said, but I also battle the nagging thought that friends on more traditional career paths are making more money. After he gave me the advice to not worry about money and to instead focus on acquiring knowledge and skills, he asked, Why would you want to be on a path like everyone else anyways? What do we say of people like Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci?” I guessed, “that they were geniuses?” “No,” Robert said. “That they were one of a kind.” We all are, he said. No two people have ever had the same DNA, the same experiences, the same struggles, the same perspective. “Embrace your unique path,” Robert said. “Embrace what makes you different, strange, even a little weird. That’s the source of your power.”
Maintain Your Distinctiveness
While working for a quantitative hedge fund in 1994, Jeff Bezos came across a statistic that web usage was growing at 2300% a year. He began thinking about potential online business ideas. After making a list, he said, “I picked books as the best product to sell online because books are incredibly unusual in one respect, and that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far…So when you have that many items, you could literally build a store online that couldn’t exist any other way.” On a walk in Central Park, Bezos told his boss about how he was thinking about starting this company that sells books online. “It actually sounds like a really good idea to me,” Bezos’ boss said, “but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.” It’s hard to be what you is, to take a unique path, Bezos would later write, because “the world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you.” It asks you, he adds, “Can’t you just be normal?” Can’t you just be content that you already have a good job? “Work to maintain your distinctiveness…it’s worth it.”
Own Your Style
Prior to writing The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel had been writing online for over a decade. In that time, he developed his unique style: in 800-1000 words, he would tell an interesting story (which usually had seemingly nothing to do with money or finance) to illustrate a lesson about money or finance. Then when Morgan began thinking about writing a book, his initial plan was to write 10 chapters, each the length of a typical book chapter (~4000-5000 words)—a length he had no experience with. Sometimes when we seek to fill a gap in our knowledge or experience, we find that we can’t or that we shouldn’t. To hit that ~4000-5000 word count, Morgan said, he rambled, he added fluff, he included additional examples that made the same point as earlier examples. And a third of the way through writing The Psychology of Money, he said, “I just didn’t like where it was going.” So he threw it all out and started over. Instead of conforming to the style of most books, he said, “I just owned the style of writing that I have.” Instead of 10 long chapters, The Psychology of Money is 20 short chapters. (One chapter is so short that when Morgan submitted it to his publisher, they emailed him and asked if he had sent the wrong file. “No,” he said, “that’s all I have to say on the topic.”) He owned his style, and it was worth it: to date, The Psychology of Money has sold over four million copies worldwide.
Where There Is A Path, It’s Someone Else’s Path
In La Queste del Saint Graal, written by an anonymous monk in the thirteenth century, a group of knights gather at King Arthur’s table. At one point, Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew, stands up and suggests that they all go on a quest to find the Holy Grail. But, the text reads, “They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the ‘Forest Adventurous’ at that point which he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no way or path.” Joseph Campbell likes to tell this story because to him it captures the essence of being what you is. We each have to enter the forest at the darkest point, Campbell writes. “Where there’s a way or a path, it is someone else’s path.”