Being yourself is overrated

The go to advice for a lot of dilemmas nowadays seems to be: ‘Just be yourself’; kind of a lazy, and uninformative thing to say to someone, even if it comes from a genuine wish to help.

I’m guilty, I’ve said the same thing more than a few times to more than a few people.

The idea that ‘being yourself’ is somehow a profound way to find the right thing to do or say isn’t so popular without a reason. It sounds good, almost noble, because what’s the alternative? Not being yourself? Being a fraud? A fake?

Fake it till you make it. I just love that saying. Some people cringe when they hear me say it. The idea of faking something in order to achieve a goal almost disgusts them. And I think it’s often more useful then the benevolent ‘being yourself’ routine people play on others and themselves.

The problem I have with the statement ‘be yourself’ is that it’s too ambiguous; you can interpret it in a misleading way. When you say it, it implies that we are static, unchanging entities; that it’s somehow predetermined what kind of people we are. It becomes an excuse for not doing things (I’m just not that type of person, that’s not me) or it merely justifies one’s bad behavior (That’s just the way I am). Either way it stifles change.

There is an ancient aphorism from which ‘Be yourself’ stems from, a much better paradigm to live by: ‘Know thyself’. A line literally set in stone, in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, over two millenniums ago. That has been forgotten and overshadowed by the arrogant idea that there is a fixed answer to who we are, and that we a priori know it.

Knowing thyself empowers you with the knowledge of what you could achieve and who you could become.

Our strengths and values are the essential parts of our character, Peter F. Drucker points out in his brilliant book Managing Oneself. If you can identify those two things you will know what to do in your life. And perhaps they are the only things constant about ourselves and it’s up to us what we do with them and who we become.

-It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves.- William Shakespeare