In a famous scene from the 1989 film Dead Poet’s Society1, Welton Academy English teacher John Keating (Robin Williams) has three of his students walk around a courtyard with the rest of the class looking on.
At first, each walks with his own cadence, but after a short period of time, each begins to walk in unison with the others. After a lap around the courtyard, the rest of the boys begin to detect the rhythm and clap in unison to match the beat of dress shoes striking stone.
Keating brings the moment to an abrupt stop.
“I brought them up here to illustrate the point of conformity: the difficulty in maintaining your own beliefs in the face of others. Now, those of you -- I see the look in your eyes like, ‘I would've walked differently.’”
“Well, ask yourselves why you were clapping. Now, we all have a great need for acceptance. But you must trust that your beliefs are unique, your own, even though others may think them odd or unpopular, even though the herd may go, ‘That's baaaaad.’ Robert Frost said, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’”
If you’re honest with yourself, you often conform to the world and the culture that surrounds you.
The world will change you bit-by-bit when you fail to take the time to stop, think about your actions, and consider whether or not they will steer you where you want to go.
You may change for the sake of acceptance from others. You may desire to assimilate with the world around you in order to gain its approval and “go with the flow.”
However, just riding the current ensures that you will end up alongside everyone else.
It is not enough to just know where you want to go. You must act according to where you want to be.
I have heard it said that friends are like elevators - they can lift you up or bring you down.
Consider who you spend the majority of your time with. It’s been said that you become the average of the five people you spend the most amount of time around. Make a careful and wise decision regarding how that time investment looks in the future.
In today’s YOU Not Me Letter, I will show you the necessity of having a clear destination, planning a course, and how to start afresh.
A Destination
Most of us conform to others around us because we accept the roles and values that culture assigns to us.
Go to school. Get a degree. Work a 9-5. Etc.
None of these things are wrong - most are of great value and importance. But, if the “thing” itself, such as school, a degree, or working a job becomes the end destination, you’re missing the whole point. You’re not only driving yourself towards dissatisfaction - you’re on the road to average.
A viral video in late 2022 surfaced on Twitter showing a number of different animals in a forest fleeing an area with a shared sense of timing and urgency.
All of them went with an identical understanding and interpretation of the event that created this behavior. Your natural instincts create this kind of response in you as well.
However, following the common course often leads to common results. It often blinds you and causes you to walk a different road than the one you want. This road deters great achievements and exceptional outcomes.
Instead of allowing the current to pull you into a drift, swim upstream like the salmon when they go to spawn. They may have to work much harder by swimming against the current, but their actions have purpose that leads to new life.
If you make the conscious decision to live a life of intent and purpose, you can achieve something that most people never will. You can live a life to your full potential, using your giftings and harnessing your passions.
What kind of life do you desire to live?
So, how can you break out of the pattern?
You need to a guide. You need someone or something who doesn’t just tell you “what” to aim at, but “how” to go about it. That’s where the magic happens.
You may have driven to a destination using a route that you felt you knew well.
Because of your self-confidence, you chose not to use GPS. Yet, you found yourself lost and in unfamiliar territory out into the world without a guide.
There may have been construction or an unforeseen accident that forced you onto a different road. If you don't have a guide, you will end up well off course.
The GPS gives you perspective from all angles on where you have come from, where you are, and where you are heading. It reassures you that even when you feel lost, you remain on the right path.
Even if you do lose your way, it helps you return to the course and head towards your desired destination, telling you “how” to get there.
You need someone or something in your life that helps you do that!
A Course
Even if and when you have a destination in mind, it’s useless unless you have determined a course.
Consider the ship whose captain plots no course.
He knows he wishes to sail east from the eastern United States, through the Atlantic, and towards Europe.
But when the sea becomes rough, when the gale blows, when the darkness comes, he will find himself all but lost from his course.
He needs someone or something to tell him when and where to guide the ship.
You need a compass to show you where to go so that you act in accordance with the desired destination.
When storms come in life and you can’t see where you’re headed, this takes on a new level of significance.
In 1952, a young woman named Florence Chadwick decided to attempt to swim to the shore of mainland California from Catalina Island - a daunting 22 miles.
She already had significant accomplishments, such as becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel both ways.
On the morning of her attempted swim, it was frigid and foggy. It was difficult for her to make out the boats that accompanied her. Still, determined as ever, she swam for fifteen hours.
She begged on a number of occasions to be taken out of the water, but her mother, who sat in the boat, told her that she could make it because she did not have that much further to go.
At last, exhausted beyond any feeling that most of us would understand, she stopped swimming, and they pulled her into the boat.
It wasn’t until she sat in the boat that she realized that the shore was less than half a mile away.
At a news conference the next day Chadwick said, “All I could see was the fog.…I think if I could have seen the shore, I would have made it.”
There’s nothing worse than giving up on a goal too soon.
I have felt like this time and time again when I started my company, YOU Not Me Empowered Consulting, and when I set out to write my book The YOU Not Me Mindset.
It’s hard. When you find yourself in the midst of a journey, a race, or a storm, you don’t have the luxury of zooming out and seeing the distance that remains to the finish line.
I feel so thankful for many people in my life who have encouraged me along the way when I felt like Florence Chadwick.
I wanted to give up, time and time again. I even painted one wall in my office with chalkboard paint and wrote my mission, vision, and other positive statements so I could remind myself each day of all of the reasons why I needed to press on with YOU Not Me.
I could look up and find encouragement, motivation, and guidance on the days when I doubted myself, my abilities, and the potential impact of the message.
Even if my company and my book just helped my immediate family, or even a few people, to live a better life, I decided it would all be worth it. I just needed to remind myself that the finish line lay somewhere out there, and I needed to continue onwards until I reached it.
How To Start Afresh
Everyone suffers from conformity in some sense. Yet, it’s more important where you choose to move now, rather than where you have been.
There’s a simple way to fix your past.
You just have to do and live one thing - YOU Not Me.
Living YOU Not Me ensures that you can turn from and heal your past, focus on loving others and enjoying life in the present, and create amazing relationships that will ensure a future full of meaning, significance, and joy.
There’s a story I love from C.S. Lewis’ book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.2
A young boy in the novel named Eustace had become a dragon through a series of tragic events that stemmed from his foolish choices, and he was desperate to return to his boyhood nature. After a massive lion approached him and told him to follow him, he realized that he could only become a boy again if he could remove his dragon scales.
“I started scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over the place… But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before.”
Then, the lion told Eustace that he would have to remove the scales. Eustace continues, “I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt.”
“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off…And there I was, as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me…and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.” 3
Questions for Reflection
Consider the outcomes of the lives of those who follow the course of this culture and world. Is that where you want to go?
What needs to change in your life in order to help you get back on course and go where you want to go?
Who or what can you look to as this source of guidance that everyone needs, especially when the path looks hazardous or becomes unclear?
Weir, Peter. Dead Poets Society. Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, 1989
Lewis, C.S. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. HarperCollins, 1952.