Be Yourself

I don't remember being told to "be myself" when I was growing up, presumably because I was supposed to learn, mature and adapt. Therefore, there was not much of a sense of what was the best pathway for an immature little girl like me. Nowadays, everywhere I turn, I see words screaming from TV, newspapers, magazines and books that we should all "follow our hearts and be ourselves and not try to be someone else." Well, exactly at what age are we supposed to master all this confidence and simply "be ourselves" irrespective of what others are telling you?

Clearly that is an unanswerable question. In the United States, many people believe that much is in the genetics in that we should all "be ourselves" from a very early age, which to me sounds a bit fatalistic - we might as well throw up our hands and pray that we have good genes and that our kids have good genes as well. In Asia, most people believe that kids don't know any better and can and should be molded, but they often don't know when to stop molding these kids. Imitation is long considered the enemy of creativity, but I have come to believe that perhaps often imitation is the foundation of creativity. Whether or not someone has real creativity is perhaps largely genetic, but creativity without a foundation of imitation (i.e. learning) is at best equivalent to toddler's doodling.

Mozart was a real genius and a rare child prodigy. However, without the access to music and musical training, his phenomenal talent would not have been uncovered. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out of college to start up companies, but what they learned before their entrepreneurial efforts were critical and fundamental, without which they would not have been able to even write any codes.

On the other hand, the pressure to conform is real. Perhaps many people who could have become decent writers, artists, musicians, scholars have ended up writing prescriptions, practicing corporate law or analyzing stock markets' movement. Even among those who did pursue a creative career, we often are dismayed to find them trying to be like someone else. For example, I saw Julie Delpy's "2 Days in Paris", which is as blatant of an effort to copy Woody Allen as there could be. Adam Goldberg was utterly irritating, because there is no way he could pull off Woody Allen's comical anxiety since he's not like that. What happened to the sexy, witty and somewhat crazy Julie Delpy in "Before Sunrise"? The creative talent behind "Before Sunrise" is utterly different from that behind "Manhattan", "Annie Hall" and "Vicki Cristina Barcelona". She should have tried to be herself, instead of Woody Allen. And if by being herself means no more ideas beyond the two movies she made with Ethan Hawke, well, so be it - perhaps that's the extent of her creativity.

Maybe after a certain age, we no longer have the excuse to "keep learning", and "be yourself" becomes an obligation as opposed to an option.