A Piece of Timeless Ancient Wisdom For Writers From This Almost 3,000 Year Old Book

The Bagavad Gita is one of the oldest books written, and yet it’s wisdom continues to inspire and teach millions of people in our modern age of 10-second TikToks and 30-second YouTube shorts.

Here’s one lesson every writer should take to heart:

It is better to follow your own path, however imperfectly, than to follow someone else’s perfectly.

You’re not the world’s best writer, and you never will be. You’re probably not even in the top 10,000. So why even bother writing?

Because you’re the only You there is—with your unique experiences in time and space, with your own idiosyncractic flaws and strengths, your own one-of-a-kind kinks and virtues.

And this mix of everything that’s you: That’s 100% unique and original. Nobody can do that better than you.

The Perplexing Paradox of Doing It Your Way

The paradox is that when you fully embrace your own uniqueness, with all the lights and shadows, the more your work speaks to others. We humans are weird creatures—we’re easily deceived, but we also have what I think of as a “truth sense”: we recognize when something is real. We just intuitively know.

If you try to write what (you think) people want to read, you might create something popular. (But even that is a tough game to play—pandering to the masses is difficult too!)

If you write what’s truly yours—especially if you have the courage and insight to really see yourself as you are, including your inadequacies, and accept them, or at least honestly wrangle with them—that’s when you create something that moves people, that touches their heart, or changes their mind. That’s when you create something deep and meaningful.

But it requires you to put a piece of your true self into your work. It requires you to know yourself, and go beyond the story you tell yourself about who you are and why you do what you do. (I’ve found this self-awareness exercise from Internal Family Systems very helpful in that regard.) It takes courage to do that. It’s harder than following in someone else’s footsteps, riskier than following a proven success system, or executing a tried-and-tested blueprint.

It requires you to follow your own path, however imperfectly, to stumble along the way, get lost, and come out looking foolish sometimes.