Chances are you’ve heard this line, “be yourself—everyone else is taken.” Chances are you’ve also seen that line attributed to Oscar Wilde. Apparently, though, as I found out today, that line isn’t found in any of Oscar Wilde’s writings. According to Professor Buzzkill, that line arose from the collective imagination of twentieth-century pop culture, a “live laugh love”-type quote-icization of a much more complex passage from Thomas Merton, twentieth-century Trappist monk and theologian. Merton’s closest line to the faux-Wilde corruption is “[…] in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else.” But Merton was talking about matters of the soul, and questions of self-effacement.
The irony of a passage championing uniqueness being created by the hive mind, yet attributed to a notorious freethinker, deserves much more reflection than I can give it here. Yet it’s a great launchpad for thinking about this notion of being yourself. I think about it a lot, because I often feel myself an outsider, not fitting in perfectly in any place. A bookish, solitary, feelings-driven polymath who longs for a soul mate yet insists on living a life where I’m not pecked at to fit in to someone else’s day; an academic with one foot in the business world and one in the intellectual; a type A and a type B in equal parts; a night owl in a morning lark society; and a highly-sensitive high-achiever to boot: this dual existence has always been with me, and it can make life really difficult, to be honest. The advice books out there are not really written for the gray areas that I—and a surprising number of others—live in. So many of them teach of a pinnacle to be reached, a way to live at peak existence, a best way of doing things.
Honoring your uniqueness is at the heart of what I write and the advice I give. I will never tell you that you must get up at 5 a.m. to have a productive day. I will never tell you not to use electronics in bed. I will, though, tell you what I do and why, what I have seen work, and the guiding principles I look to whenever I design a system or set a new goal.
These principles are pretty straightforward, and I hope they will help you: first, keep it simple. Second, honor yourself and what you need. Third, keep the final goal in mind.
No matter what, be yourself. It’s actually true, even if Oscar Wilde didn’t say it, that everyone else is already taken—but it’s more important to remember that the world needs YOU. And you are the only you in it.
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