Chapter 3 Stick to yourself, refuse to imitate

I have a letter from North Carolina from Mrs. Edith Allred.The letter said a few things: "I was raised as an extremely sensitive and shy girl. I was overweight and had a lot of flesh on my face, which made me look even fatter. My mother was very rigid and she thought it was a stupid thing to dress up too well." The thing is, if the clothes fit too well and tend to break, it is better to make them looser. She also told me to dress according to this sentence. I never go to any parties, and I have nothing to be happy about. After school, I never and The classmates did activities together, and I didn't even take gym class. I was extremely shy, and always felt that I was different from other people and that people didn't like me.

"Growing up, I married a gentleman who was a few years older than me, but I didn't make any changes. My husband's whole family seemed stable and confident. I wanted to be as confident as them, but I couldn't. I tried my best and it just didn't work out. They tried a few times to help me break through, but it always backfired and made me more withdrawn and sensitive. I was getting more and more nervous and scared to see any friends , I even panicked when the doorbell rang! I knew I was a complete failure! I knew it myself, but I was afraid that my husband would find out one day, so every time I was in public, I tried to look happy, sometimes pretending to be happy. Instead, it seemed too much. I knew it, so I was sad for several days afterwards. In the end, I really doubted whether I had the need to live, so I started thinking about suicide."

So, what happened to change this suicidal woman? Nothing else but a casual remark. Mrs. Edith went on to write: "It was just an accidental sentence that changed my life. One day, my mother-in-law and I were talking about how she raised her children and said: 'No matter what, stay true to yourself and be unique.' "The words 'stay true to yourself' flashed in front of my eyes like a slap in the face. I found that the root of my misfortune was that I had put myself into a pattern that didn't belong to me." "Overnight, I changed! I started to maintain my true colors, worked hard to study my personality, tried to recognize myself and find out my own advantages, and tried my best to learn how to match clothes to show my own taste and style. Personality. I took the initiative to make friends and joined a club. It was just a small club at first, and when they asked me to host an event, I was terrified. But every time I said a few more words, I got more courage .”

"It's been a long journey, but I'm happier now than I was in the past. When I teach my children, I will definitely teach them the lessons of these hardships: no matter what, be yourself and be unique." Dr. James Gordon Kilkay said, "The problem of 'being yourself' is as old as human history. It is a human problem." It is also the hidden cause of many mental and psychological illnesses.Angelo Petra has written 13 books on early childhood education and thousands of articles on child training.He once said: "The worst thing a man can do is not being himself, not being himself in body and mind."

This phenomenon of imitating others who cannot maintain their true colors has become rampant in Hollywood.The famous Hollywood director Sam Wood once said that the most troublesome thing for him is to help young actors overcome the problem of not being able to "maintain themselves".Each of them wants to be a second-rate Lana Telles or a third-rate Clark Gable. "The audience has had that taste," Sam Wood kept admonishing them, "and they need fresher ones now." Sam Wood worked in real estate for many years before directing the likes of "Farewell, Mr. Hipps" and "The Bell Tolls," so he developed a salesman personality.He believes that many of the rules in the business world also apply perfectly in the film world.Totally imitating someone else will never accomplish anything. "I've learned from experience," says Sam Wood, "that it's safest not to hire actors who copy other people."

I recently asked Paul Bolden, HR manager for Crow Oil, what the biggest mistake job applicants make is.He should know this, because he has interviewed more than 6,000 job candidates and wrote a book called "6 Ways to Find a Job."He replied, "The biggest mistake people make when applying for a job is not being who they are. They don't show their true colors, they can't be completely honest, and they give you the answers they think you want." But this approach Useless because no one wants hypocrites and no one ever wants to accept fake bills. It took a lot of hard work for the daughter of a tram conductor to understand this.Her dream is to be a singer, but she is not good looking.She has protruding teeth and a large mouth. Whenever she sings publicly in a New Jersey nightclub, she always wants to pull her upper lip down to hide her protruding teeth. She wants to perform "beautifully", But what about the result?She allowed herself to behave strangely, but in the end she still failed to escape the fate of failure.

Fortunately, a man present that night thought she had a great singing talent, so he said to her bluntly: "I saw your performance, and I can see what you are trying to hide. Do you think your teeth are ugly?" The girl looked very embarrassed, but the man continued: "Why do you want to do this? Is it a sin to have teeth? Don't cover it up, open your mouth wide, and the audience will like you when they see that you don't even care " He said sharply: "Besides, maybe those teeth you want to cover up will bring you good luck." The girl took his advice and stopped paying attention to her teeth.From then on, she thought only of her audience.She opened her mouth wide, sang with gusto, and went on to become an A-list star in both film and radio.Now, other singers want to imitate her instead.

William James once said: "The average person's mental capacity usage rate does not exceed 10%, and most people don't know what talents they have. Compared with the achievements we should achieve, in fact, more than half of them are not awakened. Yes. We only use a small part of our body. We tend to live within the limitations we set, we have all kinds of resources, but we often fail to use them successfully." When you and I have so much untapped potential, why worry about not being like everyone else?You are something new in this world, and there has never been one before—from the beginning of the world until now, there has never been anyone quite like you.And in the future and forever, there will never be another person who is exactly like you.New knowledge of genetics tells us that what makes you who you are depends on what your father's 23 pairs of chromosomes and your mother's 23 pairs of chromosomes inherit. "Within each chromosome," says Alan Schuinfer, "there may be dozens to hundreds of genetic elements, and in some cases, each genetic element has the potential to change a person's fate."

Even if your mother and father meet and get married, and the person who gives birth happens to be you, the chance is one in 3 billion.In other words, even if you have 3 billion siblings, they may be completely different from you.This is not fiction, these are scientific facts. Be yourself, as Irving Berlin advised the late George Gershwin. When Berlin and Gershwin first met, Berlin was famous and Gershwin was an unknown young composer earning $35 a week.Berlin appreciated Gershwin's talent very much, and asked him if he wanted to be his secretary, and the salary was about three times what he was earning at the time. "But I advise you not to take this job," Berlin advised him. "If you take this job, you may become a second-rate Berliner, but if you continue to insist on being yourself, one day you Will make a first-rate Gershwin."

Gershwin took this advice, and he eventually became one of the most famous composers in America at the time. In fact, I feel very deeply about the in-depth discussion on how to maintain the true color.I am very aware of what I am talking about, because I have paid a considerable price for it, and I have had painful experiences.When I went to New York from rural Missouri, I went to the American Academy of Drama hoping to be an actor.At that time, I had an idea that I thought was very clever—a shortcut to success: I wanted to learn how those famous actors performed at that time, I wanted to learn their strengths, and then I learned everyone’s strengths, Make myself a famous actor who combines all the advantages of others.

How foolish I am!How ridiculous!I wasted so much time imitating other people!In the end, I finally understood that I must keep my true colors, I can't be anyone. After this painful experience, it should be said that some lessons can be learned, but this is not the case.I didn't learn my lesson, and a few years later, I started writing a book, hoping it would be the best book ever written on public speaking.While writing that book, I had the same stupid thoughts I had when I was studying acting.I want to "borrow" ideas from other authors and put them in that book, making it all-encompassing.So I bought a dozen books on public speaking and spent a year incorporating their concepts into my book, only to realize once again that I had done something stupid: mishmash other people's opinions The things written together are very artificial and boring, and no one wants to read it.So, I threw the year's work into the wastebasket and started all over again. This time I said to myself: "You must maintain your own true colors. No matter how many mistakes you have and how limited your abilities are, you can't become someone else." So I stopped trying to be a synthesis of others. Instead, I rolled up my sleeves and did what I should have done: I wrote a textbook on public speaking, based entirely on my own experience and observations as an orator and a speech teacher.I learned the lesson Sir Walter Raleigh learned, and I hope to keep it forever.Sir Walter Raleigh, professor of English literature at Oxford University in 1904, said, "I cannot write a book to rival Shakespeare's, but I can write one written by myself." Arguably, Mary Margaret McBride, Will Logis, Chaplin, Kim Autrey, and thousands of others have learned what I'm here to make you understand This lesson, and they learned it the hard way, just like I did. When Mary Margaret McBride first stepped into broadcasting, she tried to be an Irish comedian, but she failed.She later came into her own, playing an unremarkable country girl from Missouri, and turned out to be New York's most popular radio star. Will Rogers was in a vaudeville troupe, just performing rope throws without any chance to speak.After doing this for many years, he discovered that he had a special talent for telling humorous jokes, so he began to talk during the performance of throwing ropes, and eventually became famous. When Chaplin first made a movie, those film directors insisted that he learn from a very famous comedian in Germany at that time, but it was not until Chaplin created his own set of acting methods that he became famous.When Kim Autrey first came out, he tried to get rid of his Texas accent and become a city gentleman, calling himself a New Yorker, and everyone laughed at him behind his back.Later, he started playing the banjo, switched to western songs, and began his remarkable acting career, becoming the most famous western singer in the world in both film and radio industries.Bob Hope had the same experience.He'd been doing musicals for years with no success until he found a knack for making fun of himself. Everyone is a new thing in this world, and everyone should be thankful for that and make every effort to take advantage of what nature has given them.At the end of the day, all art is somewhat autobiographical: you can only sing your own songs, you can only paint your own pictures, you can only be who you are as a result of your experiences, your circumstances and your family; For better or worse, you have to play your own music in the symphony of life; for better or worse, you have to create your own little garden. As Emerson puts it in his essay "On Confidence": In the course of his education, everyone must discover at some point that envy is ignorance and imitation is suicide.For better or for worse, he has to stay true to himself.Although the vast universe is full of beautiful things, unless he cultivates that piece of land that belongs to him, he will never have a good harvest.All his powers were new to nature, and no one but he knew what he could do, what he could know, and he had to try for himself. Another poet, Douglas Malloch, put it this way: To achieve peace and happiness, you must keep in mind: Be yourself, don't imitate others.