How To Be Disobedient:
If you google the phrase “How to Be Disobedient” there are ZERO results. The only results are things like “What to do about a disobedient teen” or pages on how God does not want “disobedience”. I personally searched about a trillion web pages using the most disobedient search engine of all, Google.
(the original disobeyer)
- Do the opposite. Buddha, instead of being a king, became the most impoverished, malnourished beggar possible in his quest for happiness. His family had told him his entire life he would be happy if he was king and wealthy. He did the EXACT opposite and found his happiness.
Practice: Everything that you consider doing today, consider doing the exact opposite. You don’t have to do the opposite but at least practice considering it. Maybe don’t go to that meeting. Maybe it can be a phone call. Maybe don’t write that report. Draw it instead. Maybe don’t go to that wedding. Go the beach instead. This is similar to my suggestion in “The Other Day I Woke Up Afraid and Angry” – if you are afraid of X, ask youself how you would react if the opposite of X happens (which is the likely result). Start that practice today! Right now as you’re reading this article even! Arggh! It’s a contradiction. Maybe you need to do the opposite of this article! Here’s a modification: for every thing you are told to do today: flip a coin: heads you do it, tails you don’t.
- Surprise. A surprise is an act of civil disobedience. When they thought you were going to fight, you sat. When they thought you were going to sleep, you loved. When they thought you were going to be a good employee, you stole all of their clients and started your own company. When they thought you were angry, you made them laugh. When they thought you were going to create a website for charities, you created Groupon. Surprise!
- Change one thing. Larry Page, when he was figuring out the PageRank algorithm which launched Google, didn’t start from scratch. He modified a patent developed by Robin Li (who later started Baidu) when Li was working at Dow Jones. The Dow Jones patent for search is 95% of the PageRank algorithm. So why didn’t Dow Jones start Google? Or any search engine for that matter?
Answer: companies have a hard time being disobedient. 99.9999% of the people in a company are very obedient people, so its hard then for the combined entity to be disobedient. Page, living in his garage, had no problems “changing one thing” or maybe two to create his own new search algorithm that works better than anything before or since. (See my post, “Why are Larry Page and I so Different”). This is not a criticism of “obedience” but just a reality. Procter & Gamble, despite having billions of dollars, can’t start Facebook. Which cost a few hundred dollars to build. Companies should train their employees to be disobedient. But they don’t know how. A slug crawls slowly along it’s own secretions and is happy with that meager existence.
- Steal. The best example is the first act of humanity in the Bible. Eve, going against God’s orders, stole the apple of knowledge. The result of this disobedience: all of humanity according to the Bible. For the less biblically inclined, every musical cover is an example of stealing and then “change one thing” or more. I mentioned the other day “A Fifth of Beethoven” done by the Walter Murphy Band and featured in the movie Saturday Night Fever. I’m listening to it this second. He stole Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and “changed one thing” (added a disco beat basically) and had a hit. Or how about Roy Lichtenstein. He blatantly stole panels from pop comic books, added his own text to them, and called it art. BAM! Bad behavior, Roy!
(all he did was change the color of her hair and now his version is worth$20 million)
- Combine. Take two things that are unrelated. How about DNA science and computing. And combine them. Now you have DNA Computing. Here’s the Wikipedia entry. Someone at some point must’ve said, “you can’t do that!”Or how about Andy Warhol. He “Stole” the brands (I’m thinking the classic Campbell’s Soup can) and combined it with his pop art ideas. Good thing lawyers weren’t giving him advice.
- Question Everything. I’m disgusted with myself. I believed Colin Powell when he said Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” (itself a phrase I should’ve questioned. What does a “weapon of mass destruction” even mean? The newspaper is a weapon of mass destruction.) and then used that to justify a war. I was for the war in Iraq when it was first proposed. Now I’m disgusted with myself. I wish I had questioned it more. What a pompous ass I was. Little kids got their heads shot off.
Now whenever someone tells me anything: you must go to college, you must buy a home, of course the Revolutionary War was necessary, XYZ religion is the only path to true happiness, I always question it and consider the opposite and the real reasons people are telling me these things.
Very important to remember: There’s always a “good reason” and the “real reason” and in order to find the real reason you have to question and dig deeper. Colin Powell presented us a “good reason” to go to war with Iraq but the real reasons might have to do with oil, psychological issues Bush had about his father, and who knows what else (only Dick Cheney knows).
Everything that someone tells me today I’m going to question. It takes time at first but once you start practicing questioning everything, even if its silently, then it becomes a natural routine. It’s via questioning that we become disobedient to the brainwashing society has thrust on us.
Many get too complacent in the mechanisms of the Zombie Recruitment Machine (you MUST have a job, you MUST be angry at this person who wronged you, you HAVE to be scared about Europe defaulting, you WILL be scared about going broke, you WILL listen to the doctor, etc) so it becomes difficult to question, to avoid the death of a guinea pig. But it’s the only way to break out of the Machine. To remove the bandages. To see the sun for what it is, the source of all light in your life.
- Ignore CAN’T, DON’T, SHOULDN’T, MUSTN’T: The same people who are today telling you “you can’t” are usually the same ones who say “I should’ve” about yesterday. Don’t be one of them. One man’s lunacy is another man’s delight.
- Honesty. Believe it or not, “honesty” is disobedience. Most people can’t be honest. Their friends and family would reject them. Their peers would ostracize them. Their clients and investors might part with them. In order to be honest sometimes you have to transform yourself. You have to let the sun come down, survive the 12 hours of darkness in the middle of a hurricane, and then let the new day begin. I’m not a political guy at all. I don’t watch debates. I don’t vote. I don’t even think there should be a Presidency. But I like guys like Ron Paul. Why do people listen to a simple congressman whenever he speaks? Regardless of what you think of him I feel like he’s the only one not carefully scripted. He’s honest. So people hate him. The only way you can become truly wealthy and prosperous, inside and out, is through the disobedience of honesty.
My next book is on this topic. This transformation that honesty brings. It should be on Amazon (paperback) by Friday (or the following Monday) and kindle a week or two later. Here’s the cover:
(signed paperback to the first person who tells me the cover I blatantly stole this design from)
Disobedience + Persistence = Enormous success.
If my parents, friends, colleagues, partners and others only knew the number of times I’ve disobeyed them (but always following the rule: do no harm). Maybe one day I can be totally honest without boundaries. That day the ambient stench of obedience will no longer be in my home. I’ll breathe deeply and know that I’m alive.
Mais
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário