5 Things To Do To Be A Rebel

• Swim against the tide. Do the opposite of what peer pressure tells you to do...if everyone is doing it.....tattoos, piercings, holes in their jeans, question the reason to follow the crowd or go your own way.  If you find a reason to follow, follow; if you find a reason not to follow, don’t. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. It’s okay. Give yourself permission to be yourself.

• Find the truth in your heart and soul and follow it.  If this means pursuing a profession which is not hot, that’s okay.  If you want to collect your life rewards in soul satisfaction or a sense of achievement or fulfillment, rather than money, that’s okay.  Remember you are not just an economic being, an economic unit of society.  You are an intellectual being, a physical being, a spiritual being. You and I are “spirit” above all. Even when our bodies are gone, our spirits will live on.  As my mother's spirit lives on in the poems she has left behind. So, if you are told the jobs are only in the medical field or computer field; or the money is only in the investment banking field or the law field...don’t be led like a sheep, search for that truth in your heart and in your soul and follow it.

• Don’t give in to the flavor of the day “fears”.....example, you need a job because you need medical insurance, you won’t get a job without a college degree, you need two incomes to survive.....etc and etc.....all that you will do by allowing anything at all to play on your fears.....is that you will need therapy and need prescription anxiety medication to calm down (which apparently is the most used medication in America after painkillers like Oxycontin).

• Don’t give in to flavor of the day greeds.  The big house.  The house in the 900+ API school district. The expensive vacations. The fancy car.  It will get you into a helluva lot of debt, and lead to one wrong decision after another, such as commuting a long way to work, or leading a lonely life (a frequent penalty of living in isolated splendor), just because you want to look successful.

• Set your own mile markers.  We all know the mile markers du jour - college degree, job, car, house, second house, kids in expensive private school.  That’s just the dominant culture.  Think outside the box.....if you need inspiration, read my post about Diogenes, or read the book Socrates by Paul Johnson.  Or read the book Instructions to the Cook. Get inspired.

        

These are just some ideas to get you kick-started.  I am sure if you look into your  heart and soul, you will find many more. Because you are unique - there's no one like you. As Max Lucado says in Outlive Your Life, you will not encounter another person like yourself anywhere!

P.S. 1:  Thanks for reading my unsolicited advice.  This post was inspired by an e-mail exchange between Ajay Sachdev and myself.  Ajay was always one to go his own way.  When the rest of us would do this or that just to“be cool”, Ajay was his own person. Everyone who knows him back from the day when we were in MAA will back me up on that.  Thanks Ajay for providing the inspiration for this post.

P.S.  2: If you do read Socrates by Paul Johnson (and I hope you will), tell me what Paul Johnson says Socrates might have thought about multiple choice question tests and on which page of his marvelous book about Socrates you read that.

P.S. 3: In connection with choosing a vocation or calling, thank goodness for people who follow their hearts to be academics, otherwise we wouldn’t have school teachers and college professors to teach us; and thank goodness for people who follow their hearts to be firemen and policemen and paramedics or people in the armed forces, otherwise we couldn't feel protected and safe.

P.S. 4:  Fears are typically exaggerations.  In my early years in the SFO Bay Area, I lived alone with my baby daughter in a different apartment complex from my current one. I lived there for 2 and a half years, taking my daughter for walks in her stroller, teaching her to ride a bike and doing all the normal things you would do living anywhere. I did not experience any negative incidents. Imagine my surprise to learn (years later when I had moved out) that the area I had lived in was associated with drugs, gangs and danger.  I was really amused when, once in conversation, a Mangalorean gentleman said he knew of an excellent Oriental store to buy fish from, but I would have to dash in and out of it because it was in a very dangerous area..  Little did he know that the store was in a strip mall right next to the apartment complex where I had lived, and that not only did I do my grocery shopping at that Oriental store all the time, but I patronized all of the stores in that strip mall frequently.