Do Your Thing

Categories: Blog Mar 02, 2016

When I was a kid I always felt a little… different.

That was probably because I knew I was the son of a military man living in post-Vietnam USA, growing up “off-base” and then growing up in England, again, “off-base” (“off-base” means not living on the base or post). As a result I lived in areas where generations of families lived, with very few “new” people moving into the community.

Couple that with starting school early and being the smallest and always the most uncoordinated kid in the class and I learned very quickly that it wasn’t easy to fit in. (The local British kids really “loved” me when after they taunted me by calling me a “Yank” I told them if it weren’t for us Yanks, they’d all be speaking German.)

It’s no surprise that I ended up doing things the unconventional way - making my own path. And it’s no real surprise that I ended up always challenging authority, so much so, to the point that I decided not to join the military because at 19, and as my dad later confirmed, I would’ve ended up in the brig for insubordination at the very least.

The point is, I just did my thing, the best I knew how.

And when I did things others said I should do that didn’t work out for me as they said they should, I self-evaluated and assessed the situation. If I did something wrong, I owned it, fixed my mistakes, and set out again. And when I didn’t make a mistake, but things still went wrong? I went looking for answers elsewhere.

And you should do your thing too.

Take OS for example:

It’s definitely “unconventional.” It’s definitely “different.”

Yet it helped me do my thing.

And it helped me do my thing almost virtually as I imagined it (still have a little bit of work left to do…)

It helps lots of others do their things too.

If someone laughs or makes fun of you because you’re crawling on the floor and you look silly to them, no big deal. Just do your thing.

When someone says, “that’ll never work” or “where’s the scientific proof for that?” - no worries, just keep on doing your thing.

Do whatever you need to do to do your thing.

And if OS isn’t helping you do your thing, so be it. Just make sure you honestly self-assess and evaluate the situation correctly so you don’t miss out on doing your thing.

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