"Ah, but I was much older then, I'm younger than that now." -- Bob Dylan My Back Pages
Some words are timeless. Bob Dylan wrote these words in 1964. Later, in 1965 interview he explained,
"My God, did I write that line?" He smiles. "I was in my New York phase then, or at least, I was just coming out of it. I was still keeping the things that are really, really real out of my songs, for fear they'd be misunderstood. Now," with another smile, "I don't care if they are."
Dylan continued, "No, I'm not disillusioned. I'm just not illusioned, either. The civil rights and protest songs, I wrote when nobody else was writing them. Now everyone is. But I've found out some things. The groups promoting these things, the movement, would try to get me involved with them, be their singing spokesman - and inside these groups, with all their president vice-president secretary stuff, it's politics, all politics." -- from Wikipedia
As we get older many of us become accustomed to moderating our views, holding our tongues and just plain trying to fit it. We do this for many reasons, not the least of which is to avoid confrontation.
This is only part of the problem. When working in groups or with other people, there will always be push and pulls between people with the dominant people winning most of the time.
Here are my tips for keeping it really, really real:
1. Know thyself. Daily reflections on one's life can help to remove the outside influences and will assist you in getting to a core understanding of your thoughts, behaviors and morals. What do you deeply believe in? What do you struggle with? What habits do you want to change? Even, what do you want to be when you grow up?
2. Be principled. I've found that when working on any significant project that it is immensely helpful to have a set of principles to guide you -- this is especially true when working in groups. This doesn't have to be a long diatribe. For instance, I have three main principles for this blog: a.) to provide useful content for readers; b.) to frankly discuss the struggles and achievements that I have experienced in my own life; c.) to avoid being spammy by placing firm limits on any advertising (there's none right now).
3. Establish a home base with outposts. Keeping it real is also much easier if other people aren't pulling you in their direction and towards their base. For instance, instead of always commenting on someone else's blog, create one of your own. Using this example, your blog would then be your home base where you would spend most of your time. You would still visit your "outposts" such as other blogs, facebook, and twitter. Another example of would be to start your own business or non-profit instead of working for someone else. For a good discussion of this see this Problogger article.
4. Avoid politics. There's an old saying in academia, "the politics are so fierce because the stakes are so low." I used to be in politics -- I served for ten years, beginning as a first selectman and then as a state representative. But honestly, the politics in real politics are far less than the politics you find in local committees, churches, youth sports leagues -- should I keep going?
In the state legislature, I found two principles to be very helpful:
- The first, honest people will disagree and will have different definition of fairness.
- Secondly, never question the motives of a colleague. (You may, of course, question the approach, the fairness, the necessity, etc.) These two principles remove most of the personal animosity from politics.
I've made my share of mistakes and have many times been swallowed up in other people's dreams only to leave mine behind. This is not to say that you should not get involved -- you should. Large collaborative projects can be very fulfilling, I would just suggest that you do it carefully. The key question to ask yourself is whether you are fulfilling your dreams or someone else's.
