Standalone Essays · Sojournism

How to Be Genuine

Be honest in your self-evaluation. Be neither overly boastful nor overly modest. Admit your faults but don’t get paralyzed by them. Own your strengths while neither being defined by them nor exaggerating them. Never consider yourself to have achieved the Ideal, or having learned all that can be learned. Remain on the path rather than “arriving.” Maintain your development as an ongoing process. Learn the appropriate lessons from your past and then turn your gaze forward towards the Ideal and keep straining toward it.

Be true

Do what you say and say what you mean. If you give your word, do everything you can to keep it, even in the small things like chores and appointments. If something keeps you from achieving this, own it. Apologize, make up for it, and take steps in the future to never let it happen again. Unless some dire circumstance proscribes it, always speak the truth. If you are known for your honesty, even when the truth is dark or scary or self-incriminating, then when you tell people you love them they will believe that too.

Be self-motivated

Respond more to internal expectations than to external ones. Be polite, even kind, but don’t concern yourself with being liked. If you are good, the virtuous will love you naturally and the wicked will likely dislike you. So simply practice your virtue because it is a natural part of who you are, not as a way to create a vision of who you want others to think you are.

Don’t let the desire for attention drive your actions. Sometimes the wicked will flatter you and shower you with gifts in order to entice you to their point of view. If you are overly concerned with being “liked” you will be susceptible to their blandishments. Be wary of “sucking up” to leaders. They are often used to people trying to curry favor, and if they are good leaders this will backfire on you. If they are bad leaders, you may make headway for a while but you cannot trust them to be loyal to you when the going gets rough. Just do your job as well as you can because that’s the type of person you want to be.

Be okay with the world having a low opinion of you as long as you know it isn’t true. Know your own true worth and understand the ephemeral nature of public opinion and just get the job done.

Find your own way

Do things with your personal flair, driven by your particular group of personality traits, because authenticity stems from operating within your natural inclinations. You may be introverted or extraverted. You may be autistic or allistic, an artist or an engineer. Don’t try to accomplish the mission by other people’s means. You’re wired as you were and it doesn’t have to be a problem. You were purpose-built — you just need to find your purpose. Do it the way nature wants you to do it, not necessarily the way everyone else wants you to do it.

Be brave

Don’t fear failure. You will probably fail many times, just as a baby falls over and over as it learns to walk. Failure is part of the process. It doesn’t define you. Acknowledge its possibility; do your best to avoid it; and take steps to mitigate it when it inevitably happens. But if you let the fear of failure paralyze you, you will live a much smaller and less brilliant life.

Everyone struggles with self-doubt or fear of vulnerability. It’s part and parcel with the human experience. So it’s okay to hesitate in opening up with others. You should hesitate — you’re running a risk. But you need to manage these fears. Work through them through private journaling or seeking mentorship.

Practice tenaciousness

Be consistent in your disciplines. One pushup more or less will not make a big difference. It is in the aggregate of thousands of pushups where strength and endurance lies. It is the same with virtue. Be kind, not once, but over and over until you have ground the virtue into your character. Be brave even as you fail over and over. Keep learning, even though you know you will never learn it all. You don’t need to learn it all. You just need to learn each day.

Don’t be materialistic

It’s okay to have things. It’s not okay to need things. I watched people in Chad, Central African Republic, and India who were in abject poverty. They lived in little shacks with dirt floors, cooking scraps over an open fire. Yet they smiled in welcome, shared what they had hospitably, and were quick to help in any way they could. Their children ran around pushing a bicycle tire rim with a stick, screaming in joy and laughing as though they didn’t have a care in the world. “Things” are not intrinsically necessary for happiness.

Work on discernment

Know when others are full of it and distance yourself from them. How will you identify them? By their fruit — by looking for patterns in what they do; by seeking the advice or feedback from those you’ve already identified as wise. If they aren’t honest about their true capacity, don’t do what they say they will consistently, are attention seeking, cowardly, inconsistent in their work ethic, or materialistic, they are probably someone you need to be cautious of.

Love people, but don’t be quick to trust them. We shouldn’t necessarily question the love of people who disagree with us. They’re allowed to be wrong, but there are consequences to being wrong. You don’t want to be around when those consequences arrive. Don’t belabor the point of their wrongness. Just get on with the mission and let the consequences unfold.

Don’t be too quick to judge

You are trying your best and hope others won’t judge you unfairly based on limited information. Don’t rush to conclusions about others either. Not only does reciprocity demand it, but if you remain genuinely curious and non-judgmental, others will pick up on this attitude and you will be more likely to find it reflected back to you. If you want to admit your faults without judgment and to forge your own path in life, then you must allow others to do so as well.