[Roark to Keating in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead:] “If you want my advice, Peter,” he said at last, “you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”
Well, that sums it up, eh?
Are you looking to everyone outside yourself for hints on who you are/what you should do/how you should do it? That’s a great way to live as a second-hander. Not so good if you want to be happy. :)
As Campbell says: “You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or a path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.”
Where there is a path, it’s not yours. Someone else’s advice on the path you should take is not yours. Trust yourself.
[Emerson seems appropriate here: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.”]
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