The Best Advice

When I was a ~14 years old and freshman in high school, I was taking a (sort of advanced) Biology class that also had sophomores and juniors in attendance.

Our teacher was an eccentric Australian biochemical engineer that in a parallel universe would have worked for Monsanto. But instead he was our resident spacey (or high) eccentric teacher.

On this particular day our resident Aussie was out sick and instead of getting a substitute teacher – our school’s other biology teacher (from across the hall) sat in.

This other teacher had a kind of Magnum PI vibe to him (although Magnum PI didn’t exist yet). He was in his mid-30s and in addition to teaching biology and other science classes, he was also an aquatics coach and during the summers was a lifeguard at the local beach.

Instead of sticking to the curriculum and reviewing the differences between mitosis and meiosis or the differences between the Krebs cycle and photosynthesis – he proceeded to give the class the best advice I ever heard:

The most important thing you can do for yourself is to take the time to sit quietly in your room and be brutally honest with yourself about who you are and what you want to do with the rest of your life. Forget about what your parents want….or what your classmates think….or all the other chatter out there. It is important for you to strip that all away and decide for yourself. Because at the end of the day it is “your” life and you are the one that has to live it.

I don’t know if anyone else in the classroom that day was paying attention. (Bueller…..Bueller….) ;-)

But I was.

And I took what he said to heart and applied it to my life from that day forward.

As I got older…and life happened…I made my own tweak to his advice and turned it into a question:

Who are you when you are not doing the things you do?

I noticed that most people define themselves externally rather than internally.

In other words, people tend to describe themselves by external labels: husband, wife, father, daughter, accountant, lawyer, teacher, geek, etc.

The people who don’t have a sense of who they are when they are not doing the things they do tend to get lost when pulled out of their natural environment.

You see this all the time on Reality TV shows like Big Brother or Survivor when folks are literally taken out of their natural habitat and put into a strange situation. Many of these folks (particularly in the first seasons of the shows) find themselves completely lost and rudderless.

The people that tend to do well in these types of situations are the ones that are the most self-aware and can answer the question.

So, who are you when you are not doing the things you do?

(take your time…there is no right or wrong answer here….)