What happened to change this unhappy woman’s life? Just a chance remark!
“A chance remark,” Mrs. Allred continued, “transformed my whole life. My mother-in-law was talking one day of how she brought her children up, and she said: ‘No matter what happened, I always insisted on their being themselves.’ … ‘On being themselves.’ … That remark is what did it! In a flash, I realised I had brought all this misery on myself by trying to fit myself into a pattern to which I did not conform.
“I changed overnight! I started being myself. I tried to make a study of my own personality. Tried to find out what I was. I studied my strong points. I learned all I could about colours and styles, and dressed in a way that I felt was becoming to me. I reached out to make friends. I joined an organisation-a small one at first-and was petrified with fright when they put me on a programme. But each time I spoke, I gained a little courage. It took a long while-but today I have more happiness than I ever dreamed possible. In rearing my own children, I have always taught them the lesson I had to learn from such bitter experience: No matter what happens, always be yourself!”
This problem of being willing to be yourself is “as old as history,” says Dr. James Gordon Gilkey, “and as universal as human life.” This problem of being unwilling to be yourself is the hidden spring behind many neuroses and psychoses and complexes. Angelo Patri has written thirteen books and thousands of syndicated newspaper articles on the subject of child training, and he says: “Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.”
This craving to be something you are not is especially rampant in Hollywood. Sam Wood, one of Hollywood’s best-known directors, says the greatest headache he has with aspiring young actors is exactly this problem: to make them be themselves. They all want to be second-rate Lana Turners, or third-rate Clark Gables. “The public has already had that flavour,” Sam Wood keeps telling them; “now it wants something else.”
Before he started directing such pictures as Good-bye, Mr. Chips and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Sam Wood spent years in the real-estate business, developing sales personalities. He declares that the same principles apply in the business world as in the world of moving pictures. You won’t get anywhere playing the ape. You can’t be a parrot. “Experience has taught me,” says Sam Wood, “that it is safest to drop, as quickly as possible, people who pretend to be what they aren’t.”
I recently asked Paul Boynton, employment director for the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, what is the biggest mistake people make in applying for jobs. He ought to know: he has interviewed more than sixty thousand job seekers; and he has written a book entitled 6 Ways to Get a Job. He replied: “The biggest mistake people make in applying for jobs is in not being themselves. Instead of taking their hair down and being completely frank, they often try to give you the answers they think you want.” But it doesn’t work, because nobody wants a phony. Nobody ever wants a counterfeit coin.
A certain daughter of a street-car conductor had to learn that lesson the hard way. She longed to be a singer. But her face was her misfortune. She had a large mouth and protruding buck teeth. When she first sang in public-in a New Jersey night-club-she tried to pull down her upper Up to cover her teeth. She tried to act “glamorous”. The result? She made herself ridiculous. She was headed for failure.
However, there was a man in this night-club who heard the girl sing and thought she had talent. “See here,” he said bluntly, “I’ve been watching your performance and I know what it is you’re trying to hide. You’re ashamed of your teeth.” The girl was embarrassed, but the man continued: “What of it? Is there any particular crime in having buck teeth? Don’t try to hide them! Open your mouth, and the audience will love you when they see you’re not ashamed. Besides,” he said shrewdly, “those teeth you’re trying to hide may make your fortune!”
Cass Daley took his advice and forgot about her teeth. From that time on, she thought only about her audience. She opened her mouth wide and sang with such gusto and enjoyment that she became a top star in movies and radio. Other comedians are now trying to copy her!
The renowned William James was speaking of men who had never found themselves when he declared that the average man develops only ten per cent of his latent mental abilities. “Compared to what we ought to be,” he wrote, “we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.”
You and I have such abilities, so let’s not waste a second worrying because we are not like other people. You are something new in this world. Never before, since the beginning of time, has there ever been anybody exactly like you; and never again throughout all the ages to come will there ever be anybody exactly like you again. The new science of genetics informs us that you are what you are largely as a result of twenty-four chromosomes contributed by your father and twenty-four chromosomes contributed by your mother. These forty-eight chromosomes comprise everything that determines what you inherit. In each chromosome there may be, says Amran Sheinfeld, “anywhere from scores to hundreds of genes -with a single gene, in some cases, able to change the whole life of an individual.” Truly, we are “fearfully and wonderfully” made.
Even after your mother and father met and mated, there was only one chance in 300,000 billion that the person who is specifically you would be born! In other words, if you had 300,000 billion brothers and sisters, they might have all been different from you. Is all this guesswork? No. It is a scientific fact. If you would like to read more about it, go to your public library and borrow a book entitled You and Heredity, by Amran Scheinfeld.
I can talk with conviction about this subject of being yourself because I feel deeply about it. I know what I am talking about. I know from bitter and costly experience. To illustrate: when I first came to New York from the cornfields of Missouri, I enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. I aspired to be an actor. I had what I thought was a brilliant idea, a short cut to success, an idea so simple, so foolproof, that I couldn’t understand why thousands of ambitious people hadn’t already discovered it. It was this: I would study how the famous actors of that day-John Drew, Walter Hampden, and Otis Skinner-got their effects. Then I would imitate the best point of each one of them and make myself into a shining, triumphant combination of all of them. How silly I How absurd! I had to waste years of my life imitating other people before it penetrated through my thick Missouri skull that I had to be myself, and that I couldn’t possibly be anyone else.
That distressing experience ought to have taught me a lasting lesson. But it didn’t. Not me. I was too dumb. I had to learn it all over again. Several years later, I set out to write what I hoped would be the best book on public speaking for business men that had ever been written. I had the same foolish idea about writing this book that I had formerly had about acting: I was going to borrow the ideas of a lot of other writers and put them all in one book-a book that would have everything. So I got scores of books on public speaking and spent a year incorporating their ideas into my manuscript. But it finally dawned on me once again that I was playing the fool. This hodgepodge of other men’s ideas that I had written was so synthetic, so dull, that no business man would ever plod through it. So I tossed a year’s work into the wastebasket, and started all over again.
This time I said to myself: “You’ve got to be Dale Carnegie, with all his faults and limitations. You can’t possibly be anybody else.” So I quit trying to be a combination of other men, and rolled up my sleeves and did what I should have done in the first place: I wrote a textbook on public speaking out of my own experiences, observations, and convictions as a speaker and a teacher of speaking. I learned-for all time, I hope-the lesson that Sir Walter Raleigh learned. (I am not talking about the Sir Walter who threw his coat in the mud for the Queen to step on. I am talking about the Sir Walter Raleigh who was professor of English literature at Oxford back in 1904.) “I can’t write a book commensurate with Shakespeare,” he said, “but I can write a book by me.”
Be yourself. Act on the sage advice that Irving Berlin gave the late George Gershwin. When Berlin and Gershwin first met, Berlin was famous but Gershwin was a struggling young composer working for thirty-five dollars a week in Tin Pan Alley. Berlin, impressed by Gershwin’s ability, offered Gershwin a job as his musical secretary at almost three times the salary he was then getting. “But don’t take the job,” Berlin advised. “If you do, you may develop into a second-rate Berlin. But if you insist on being yourself, some day you’ll become a first-rate Gershwin.”
Gershwin heeded that warning and slowly transformed himself into one of the significant American composer of his generation.
Charlie Chaplin, Will Rogers, Mary Margaret McBride, Gene Autry, and millions of others had to learn the lesson I am trying to hammer home in this chapter. They had to learn the hard way-just as I did.
When Charlie Chaplin first started making films, the director of the pictures insisted on Chaplin’s imitating a popular German comedian of that day. Charlie Chaplin got nowhere until he acted himself. Bob Hope had a similar experience: spent years in a singing-and-dancing act-and got nowhere until he began to wisecrack and be himself. Will Rogers twirled a rope in vaudeville for years without saying a word. He got nowhere until he discovered his unique gift for humour and began to talk as he twirled his rope.
When Mary Margaret McBride first went on the air, she tried to be an Irish comedian and failed. When she tried to be just what she was-a plain country girl from Missouri-she became one of the most popular radio stars in New York.
When Gene Autry tried to get rid of his Texas accent and dressed like city boys and claimed he was from New York, people merely laughed behind his back. But when he started twanging his banjo and singing cowboy ballads, Gene Autry started out on a career that made him the world’s most popular cowboy both in pictures and on the radio.
You are something new in this world. Be glad of it. Make the most of what nature gave you. In the last analysis, all art is autobiographical. You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you.
For better or for worse, you must cultivate your own little garden. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.
As Emerson said in his essay on “Self-Reliance” : “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
That is the way Emerson said it. But here is the way a poet -the late Douglas Malloch-said it:
If you can’t be a pine on the top of the hill.
Be a scrub in the valley-but be
The best little scrub by the side of the rill;
Be a bush, if you can’t be a tree.
If you can’t be a bush, be a bit of the grass.
And some highway happier make;
If you can’t be a muskie, then just be a bass-
But the liveliest bass in the lake!
We can’t all be captains, we’ve got to be crew.
There’s something for all of us here.
There’s big work to do and there’s lesser to do
And the task we must do is the near.
If you can’t be a highway, then just be a trail,
If you can’t be the sun, be a star;
It isn’t by the size that you win or you fail-
Be the best of whatever you are!
To cultivate a mental attitude that will bring us peace and freedom from worry, here is Rule 5:
Let’s not imitate others. Let’s find ourselves and be ourselves.