It's Harder Than Ever to Be Yourself
I read Emerson's Self-Reliance every year, and it never fails to teach me something new.
Lately, I've been struggling with trusting my instincts and having confidence in my own creativity. So I picked it back up last night.
I believe we take our own ideas and instincts for granted because they come so easily to us. Just as Emerson says, "We take our own ideas, our own thoughts and creativity for granted because they're ours."
It's harder than ever to be yourself, especially your creative self. Today's world is filled with enough hacks, tips, and techniques to fill an entire blog (and most are filled with nothing but).
We're inundated with bite-sized secrets and strategies shared by experts who are light-years ahead and make us feel that we should be the same.
In fact, we’re buried in shoulds; how could we ever hope to hear our own voice? It fades behind the noise of the modern self-help, business-book world.
Yes, we live in the age of information, but folks confuse this with the ease of application. Just because it's easy to learn something new doesn't mean it's just as easy to execute.
Anymore, when I read of someone's success story, I wonder if I'm impressed by their success or more so by the confidence they had to pave their own path.
Because that's what it takes; that's the secret that no one's sharing: There is no secret. You must roll up your sleeves and make mistake after mistake, learning how to be yourself and trust yourself in the process.
Creative confidence can't be taught, no matter how many podcasts you subscribe to or books you read (even, sadly, Emerson). But it can be learned, and you have to be your own teacher.
As Emerson says, "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all [wo]men, that is genius."
This post was written as a part of Ship 30 for 30. Read the original essay on my Twitter.
