BillLindau

Doing Your Own Thing

Doing your own thing: An oldie but a goodie
By Bill Lindau
Does anybody know of a phrase more butchered and misused than “doing your own thing”?
Back in the 1960s it was a great philosophy to live by, and as far as I’m concerned, it still is: Being into a livelihood or activity that you genuinely enjoy, at which you really are good, and doing it for better reasons than to please your father or your mother or make a lot of money. The Founding Fathers were among the more famous people who did their own thing. So were the first proponents of free enterprise (are you listening, corporate right-wing types?).
But in recent years, in the wake of the so-called counterculture of the 1960s, “doing your own thing” took on a slightly more sinister meaning. I guess it began when Reagan took office and people wanted to get back to the mom-and-apple pie days, before those degenerate commie radical lefties took over the country.
I figured out what that phrase was bringing to people’s minds one evening when I was covering a high-school sports awards banquet. A coach told about one of his athletes who hit the skids. “He was a good athlete, but he believed in doing his own thing,” the coach said.
Then the coach went into a horror story about how this falling-angel athlete quit the team and started doing drugs. His grades dropped, and when he wanted to rejoin the team, he couldn’t because his grades were too low. So now the ex-athlete’s flipping burgers or something.
I’ve heard people say “doing your own thing” when they’re making fun of so-called hippies, putting down the counterculture.
The way these people (and that high-school coach) said “do your own thing,” it brings to mind some bedraggled old flower child with glazed eyes, a doobie in one hand and tin cup in the other, saying “Far out.”
That is not what doing your own thing is supposed to mean at all.
“Doing your own thing” means exactly what I said in the first paragraph. It means doing something just because you love it and you’re good at it, not because your mom or your dad or your big brother/sister or your coach or your preacher/priest/rabbi told you to. It’s about doing it well and not caring about other people’s opinions, and above all not putting pressure on yourself or beating up on yourself because you don’t always meet somebody else’s expectations (or even your own, if you happen to set them too high).
I mean, what’s so bad about that, Jim?
Doing your own thing is not:
* Sitting on your behind all day, not working or going to school
* Drinking booze or smoking dope or whatever
* Ignoring your responsibilities to your family, your friends, your boss or whatever other activity you’re in or
* Doing anything you bloody well please even if it hurts somebody you care about.
Doing your own thing is more of a state of mind than anything else. It doesn’t mean you ought to quit playing football or working for a major corporation, moving into a commune and making a living making moccasins. You can play football, be chairman of the board at General Motors, be a fighter pilot, write novels or make moccasins and do your own thing. You just have to like it, know you’d rather to that than anything else in the whole wide world, and know you’d have gone for it even if other people in your life wanted you to do something else.
One other concept that goes along with doing your own thing: Knowing this world is full of people who are into the same thing you’re into. Some are better and some are worse. But don’t worry about what they do, worry about what you do.
When you’re driving down the road, and you look too much in your rearview mirror at the cars behind you, you’re bound to get into a real cock-up. That’s the way it is in business. Take a look at what your neighbor’s doing and try to keep up your own good work, but don’t worry about him too long or you’ll work yourself into a tizzy. Then your product won’t be worth a hoot, because you got too wrought up worrying about the other folks and not staying focused on your own job. Presto! You mess up, the other people get the better of you.
Years ago I lived and worked in a county with two competing newspapers. The one I wrote for had a general manager who went into sheer hysterics whenever the competing paper got a big story that we didn’t. R.B. got so obsessed with what they were doing he once called a meeting on Friday afternoon and threatened to fire all his news staff if they didn’t stop getting scooped.
We did our best to outdo the other paper, but they had people who were older on the average than we were, who knew many more important people, and with an office more centrally located; ours was on the other side of the county.
We made friends with some of that other paper’s reporters. They told us their publisher read our paper just as much as R.B. read theirs. Sometimes we managed to scoop them on a story, but their reporters said whenever that happens, old Sam R. would shrug his shoulders and say something like, “Oh, well, that’s media competition for you.”
And that was the end of it.
Last week I commented on the proliferation of LBP (laidbackphobia) and mentioned a few cases. R.B. was another case, a really bad one. When somebody on his staff said he didn’t believe in having a competitive attitude, he said, “You better start having one, son, or you‘re gonna end up on the street! I don’t wanna hear that hippie-dippy nonsense!“
The poor dude got to be so unbearable everybody on his news staff quit within five months. One of them went to the other newspaper.
Six months later R.B. took another job. Turns out he was really a laid-back, do-your-own-thing type of person at heart; he just had a lot of type-A, upper-echelon tyrants putting so much pressure on him that he couldn’t help putting it on the rest of us. Now he’s running a newspaper in the mountains, with one of his old friends from his former chain, and he’s happy as a proverbial clam. I’m happy for him.
We’re putting a lot of things on your younger generation that the baby boomers’ parents once put on them, if not more. We stuff them into this activity or that, hardly leaving them any down time, and we may not even know if they’re really enjoying it. Some schools are making them wear uniforms, taking away their sense of identity and trying to turn them into future corporate yes-persons, flunkies, drones if you will.
I think sometime or other we should ask both ourselves and our children, “Are you really doing your own thing?”
If you or your kid says “Yes,” then great. If not, there’s work to be done.
One of the happiest days of my life was when stopped getting hung up on impressing or trying to please anybody, when I was toiling away at something and thought, “Hey, man, this is just where I want to be!”
It would be a delight if everybody in the world had that feeling at some time in his/her life. We could put a lot of psychiatrists out of business. Quite a few prison guards, too.
That’s what doing your own thing can do for this mean old uptight world. Peace, love and good karma, everybody!
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Contact Bill Lindau at blindau52@yahoo.com or (910) 582-6610.

posted by Bill Lindau @ 10:51 PM