Be a Master rather than a follower

I asked a group of students to submit the topics of their speeches for a programme that the school was organising. One of the students asked me if she could choose the topic ‘Don’t be a follower’. I looked at her in surprise and she was baffled. “What a coincidence!” I said. I was at that time reading the first chapter of the book titled Mastery by Robert Greene. The page I was reading was about the social pressures on every individual to conform, to be a follower.

This social pressure is a counterforce to the vital force within each individual which urges him to nurture his uniqueness to fruition so that he will be the master that he was born to be. Greene’s thesis is worth paying attention to.

Each one of us is preciously unique. There is no other individual like you; there never was and never will be. Your Life’s Task is to discover that uniqueness, nurture it and bring it to fruition. It’s as natural a process as a seed growing up into a plant and then producing flowers and fruits.

But there are counterforces that work against that natural inborn force. One of the dominant counterforces is the social pressure to conform. The society wants you to fit into a group and be like the others in the group. We end up being imitations of others in a religion, a social community, and probably many other groups. Loners are usually perceived as dangerous people. Society abhors loners. Moreover, most of us love to belong to groups; that’s a strong urge. It’s easy to live too if we merge, without an articulate personal identity, into a group, the dominant one if possible. We usually end up being parts of many groups some of which may be contradictory to each other.

When we do that we lose touch with our uniqueness, Greene says. “Your inclinations and desires become modelled on those of others.” You become just another mediocre person who does the same things as most others. Your potential to be a master is strangled.

If you wish to become a Master, look inward and discover your uniqueness. There’s always something or many mutually related things that arouse your passion, something that you enjoy doing even as Charles Darwin enjoyed collecting biological specimens or Albert Einstein playing with abstract concepts about the forces that work in nature.

Your career must be related to that passion. Otherwise you end up doing merely a job without enjoying it really. In order to enjoy life you’ll then seek happiness in other things like possessions or entertainments or whatever. When your profession is in harmony with your innate passions, it is easy to be a Master.

The path toward Masterhood is not an easy one, however. There are the inevitable twists and turns. You’ll have to learn new skills on the way. You’ll encounter failures and problems. But you have to plod on until you reach where you are supposed to reach. When you reach there you see that your life has a clear sense of purpose. You have become the Master that you were born to be.

Statutory Warning: Masters are usually lonely people.

PS. I'm not a Master.