Choosing to Be Yourself

选择做你自己

A lot of what goes on today is what many of you are doing right now—beating yourself up and scribbling notes and saying, “I need to do this, and I need to do that, and I need to do…” No, you don’t need to do anything.

今天发生的很多事情就是你们中的许多人现在正在做的—痛打自己，草草写下笔记，然后说，“我需要这样做，我需要这样做，我需要那样做，我需要做…。”不，你什么都不需要做。

All you should do is what you want to do. If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then, you get to be you.

你应该做的就是你想做的事。如果你不再试图弄清楚如何按照别人希望你做的方式去做事情，你就会听到你脑海中想要以某种方式做事情的那个小小的声音。然后，你就可以做你自己了。

I never met my greatest mentor. I wanted so much to be like him. But his message was the opposite: Be yourself, with passionate intensity.

我从未见过我最好的导师。我很想像他一样。但他传达的信息恰恰相反：做你自己，带着激情的强度。

No one in the world is going to beat you at being you. You’re never going to be as good at being me as I am. I’m never going to be as good at being you as you are. Certainly, listen and absorb, but don’t try to emulate. It’s a fool’s errand. Instead, each person is uniquely qualified at something. They have some specific knowledge, capability, and desire nobody else in the world does, purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development.

世界上没有人能打败你做你自己。你永远不会像我一样擅长做我我永远不会像你那样擅长做你。当然，倾听和吸收，但不要试图效仿。这是愚蠢的差事。相反，每个人在某些方面都是独一无二的。他们有一些世界上其他人没有的特定知识、能力和愿望，纯粹是从人类DNA和发育的组合中获得的。

The combinatorics of human DNA and experience are staggering. You will never meet any two humans who are substitutable for each other.

人类DNA和经验的组合是惊人的。你永远不会遇到任何两个可以相互替代的人类。

Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. What you don’t want to do is build checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing. You’re never going to be them. You’ll never be good at being somebody else. [4]

你的人生目标是找到最需要你的人、生意、项目或艺术。外面有一些东西是专为你准备的。你不想做的是建立建立在其他人正在做的事情上的检查表和决策框架。你永远不会成为他们。你永远不会擅长做别人。

To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.

要做出原创性的贡献，你必须非理性地执着于某件事。