The 50th Law (25 page)

There is, however, a completely different concept of liberty. It is not something that people grant us as a privilege or right. It is a state of mind that we must work to attain and hold on to—with much effort. It is something active and not passive. It comes from exercising free will. In our day-to-day affairs much of our actions are not free and independent. We tend to conform to society’s norms in behavior and thinking. We generally act out of habit, without much thought as to why we do things. When we act with freedom, we ignore any pressures to conform; we step beyond our usual routines. Asserting our will and our individuality, we move on our own.

Let us say we have a career that affords us enough money to live comfortably and offers us a reasonable future. But this job is not deeply satisfying; it doesn’t lead us anywhere we want to go. Perhaps we also have to deal with a boss who is difficult and imperious. Our fears for the future, our comfortable habits, and our sense of propriety will compel us to stay on. All of these factors are forces that limit and confine us. But at any moment we could let go of the fear and leave the job, not really certain where we are headed but confident we can do better. In that moment we have exercised free will. It initiates from our own deepest desire and need. Once we leave, our mind must rise to the challenge. To continue on this path, we have to take more independent actions, because we cannot depend on habits or friends to see us through. Free action has a momentum of its own.

Many will argue that this idea of active freedom is basically an illusion. We are products of our environment, so they say. If people become successful, it is because they benefited from certain favorable social circumstances—they were in the right place at the right time; they got the proper education and mentoring. Their willpower played a part, no doubt, but a small part. If circumstances were different, so the argument goes, these types would not have had the success they had, no matter how strong their willpower.

All kinds of statistics and studies can be trotted out to support this argument, but in the end this concept is merely a product of our times and the emphasis on passive freedom. It chooses to focus on circumstance and environment, as if the exceptionally free actions of a Frederick Douglass could also be explained by his physiology or the luck he had in learning to read. In the end, such a philosophy
wants
to deny the essential freedom we all possess to make a decision independent of outside forces. It wants to diminish individuality—we are just products of a social process, they imply.

Understand: at any moment you could kick this philosophy and its ideas into the trashcan by doing something irrational and unexpected, contrary to what you have done in the past, an act not possibly explained by your upbringing or nervous system. What prevents you from taking such action is not mommy, daddy, or society, but your own fears. You are essentially free to move beyond any limits others have set for you, to re-create yourself as thoroughly as you wish.

If you had some terribly painful experience in the past, you could choose to let that pain sit there and you could soak in it. On the other hand, you could decide to convert it into anger, a cause to promote, or some form of action. Or you could choose to simply drop it and move on, relishing the freedom and power that that brings you. No one can take away these options or force your response. It is all up to you.

Moving to this more active form of freedom does not mean that you are giving yourself over to wild and ill-considered action. Your decision to alter a career path, for instance, is based on careful consideration of your strengths and deepest desires and the future you want. It comes from thinking for yourself and not accepting what others think about you. The risks you take are not emotional and for the sake of a thrill; they are calculated. The need to conform and please others will always play a role in our actions, consciously or unconsciously. To be completely free is impossible and undesirable. You are merely exploring a freer range of action in your life and the power it could bring you.

What block us from moving in this direction are the pressures we feel to conform; our rigid, habitual patterns of thinking; and our self-doubts and fears. The following are five strategies to help you push past these limits.

DEFY ALL CATEGORIES

As a young girl growing up in Kansas at the turn of the twentieth century, Amelia Earhart felt oddly out of place. She liked to do things her own way—playing rough games with the boys, spending hours by herself reading books, or disappearing on long hikes. She was prone to behavior that others considered strange and unorthodox—at boarding school she was kicked out for walking on the roof in her nightgown. As she got older she felt intense pressure to settle down and be more like other girls. Earhart had an abhorrence, however, of marriage and the constrictions it represented for women, so she looked for a career, trying her hand at all kinds of jobs. But she craved adventure and challenges, and the jobs available to her were menial and mindless.

Then one day in 1920 she went for a short ride in an airplane, and suddenly she knew she had found her calling. She took lessons and became a pilot. In the air she felt the freedom she had always been looking for. Piloting a plane was a constant challenge—physical and mental. She could express the daring side of her character, her love of adventure, as well as her interest in the mechanics of flying.

Female pilots at the time were not taken seriously. The men were the ones who set records and blazed new paths. To combat this, Earhart had to push the limits as far as she could, doing feats of flying that would make headlines and contribute something to the profession. In 1932 she became the first woman to pilot a plane solo across the Atlantic, in what would turn out to be her most death-defying and physically arduous flight. In 1935 she contemplated doing a crossing of the Gulf of Mexico. One of the most famous male pilots of the time told her it was too dangerous and not worth the risk. Feeling there was a challenge in this, she decided to attempt the flight anyway and managed it with relative ease, showing others how it could be done.

If at any moment in her life she had succumbed to the pressure to be more like others, she would have lost that magic that now seemed to follow her when she went her own direction. She decided to continue being herself, whatever the consequences might be. She dressed in her unconventional manner and spoke her mind on political matters, even though that was considered unbecoming. When the famous publicist and promoter George Putnam asked for her hand in marriage, Earhart accepted under the condition that he sign a contract guaranteeing he would respect her desires for maximum freedom within the relationship.

People who met her invariably commented that she was not really masculine or feminine or even androgynous, but completely herself, a unique mix of qualities. It was this part of her that fascinated people and kept her in the limelight. In 1937, she attempted the riskiest flight of her career—to circle the world via the equator, including a stopover on a tiny island in the Pacific. She disappeared somewhere near the island, never to be found, all of which only added to the legend of Earhart as the consummate risk taker who did everything her own way.

Understand: the day you were born you became engaged in a struggle that continues to this day and will determine your success or failure in life. You are an individual, with ideas and skills that make you unique. But people are constantly trying to fit you into narrow categories that make you more predictable and easier to manage. They want to see you as shy or outgoing, sensitive or tough. If you succumb to this pressure, then you may gain some social acceptance, but you will lose the unconventional parts of your character that are the source of your uniqueness and power. You must resist this process at all costs, seeing people’s neat and tidy judgments as a form of confinement. Your task is to retain or rediscover those aspects of your character that defy categorization, and to give them even greater play. Remaining unique, you will create something unique and inspire the kind of respect you would never receive from tepid conformity.

CONSTANTLY REINVENT YOURSELF

As a child, the future president John F. Kennedy was extremely frail and prone to illness. He spent much time in various hospitals, and grew up to be rather frail and weak looking. From these experiences he developed a horror of anything that made him feel that he had no control over his life. And one form of powerlessness particularly irked him—the judgments people made of him based on his appearance. They would see him as weak and fragile, underestimating his underlying strength of character. So he initiated a lifelong process of wresting this control from others, constantly re-creating himself and casting the image that he wanted people to see of him.

As a youth, he was perceived as the pleasure-loving son of a powerful father, so at the outbreak of World War II, despite his physical limitations, he enlisted in the navy, determined to show another side of himself. As a lieutenant on a patrol torpedo in the Pacific, his boat was rammed and cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. He proceeded to lead his men to safety in a way that earned him numerous medals for bravery. During this incident he displayed an almost callous disregard for his own life, perhaps in an attempt once and for all to prove his masculinity. In 1946, he decided to run for Congress, and he used his war record to craft the image of a young man who would be an equally fearless fighter for his constituency.

A few years later, as a senator, he realized that many in the public perceived him as a bit of a lightweight—young and unproven. And so yet again, he chose to reinvent himself, this time by writing a book (authored with his speechwriter Theodore Sorenson) called
Profiles in Courage
, cataloguing stories of famous senators who defied convention and achieved great things. The book won a Pulitzer Prize, and more important, it completely altered the image the public had of Kennedy. He was now seen as thoughtful and independent, somehow following the path of the senators he had written about—clearly an intended effect.

In 1960, when Kennedy was running for president, people once again underestimated him. They saw him as the young Catholic liberal senator who could not possibly appeal to the majority of Americans. This time he decided to recast himself as the inspiring prophet who would lead the country out of the doldrums of the Eisenhower era, returning America to its frontier roots and creating a sense of unified purpose. It was an image of vigor and youth (contrary to his still physical weakness) and it proved compelling enough to captivate the public and win the election.

Understand: people judge you by appearances, the image you project through your actions, words, and style. If you do not take control of this process, then people will see and define you the way they want to, often to your detriment. You might think that being consistent with this image will make others respect and trust you, but in fact it is the opposite—over time you seem predictable and weak. Consistency is an illusion anyway—each passing day brings changes within you. You must not be afraid to express these evolutions. The powerful learn early in life that they have the freedom to mold their image, fitting the needs and moods of the moment. In this way, they keep others off balance and maintain an air of mystery. You must follow this path and find great pleasure in reinventing yourself, as if you were the author writing your own drama.

SUBVERT YOUR PATTERNS

Animals depend on instincts and habits to survive. We as humans depend on our conscious, rational thinking, which gives us greater freedom of action, the ability to alter our behavior according to circumstance. And yet that animal part of our own nature, that compulsion to repeat the same things, tends to dominate our way of thinking. We succumb to mental patterns, which makes our actions repetitive as well. This was the problem that the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright was obsessed with, and he came up with a powerful solution.

As a young architect in the 1890s, Wright could not understand why most people in his profession chose to design buildings based on patterns. Houses had to follow a certain model, determined by materials and cost. One style became popular, and people copied it endlessly. Living in such a house or working in such offices would make people feel soulless, like cogs in a machine. In nature, no two trees are ever the same. A forest is formed in a kind of random fashion and that is its beauty. Wright was determined to follow this organic model rather than the mass-produced model of the machine age. Despite the cost and energy, he decided that no two buildings of his would ever be the same in any way. He would extend this to his own behavior and interactions with others—he took delight in being capricious, in doing the opposite of what colleagues and clients expected from him. This eccentric manner of working led to the creation of revolutionary designs that made him the most famous architect of his time.

In 1934 he was commissioned by Edgar Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store magnate, to design a vacation house facing a waterfall on Bear Creek in rural Pennsylvania. Wright needed to see the design in his mind before he could commit it to paper; for this project nothing would come to him, and so he decided to play a game on himself. He simply ignored the work. Months went by. Finally Kaufmann had had enough and telephoned Wright—he demanded to see the design. Wright exclaimed that it was finished. Kaufmann said he would be over in two hours to look it over.

Wright’s associates were aghast—he had not yet penciled in one line. Nonplussed and with a rush of creative energy, he began to design the house. It would not face the waterfall, he decided, but stand over and incorporate it. When Kaufmann saw the design, he was delighted. The house became known as Fallingwater, often considered Wright’s most beautiful creation. In essence, Wright had forced his mind to face the problem without research or preconceptions, completely in the moment. It was an exercise to free himself from prior habits and create something totally new.