Conform or Be Brave?

For a long time in my career and life, I have struggled between conformity and to be brave to make bold changes.

Regardless whether you like it or not, life is about conformity. People demands and expects you to behave in a certain way, otherwise you will be treated like an outcast. Organization has culture that mandates you to follow, otherwise you will not be in the inner circle of management. Society imposes norms on all of us that we have to adapt to, otherwise you will be seen as someone who is anti-social. Face it, no one wants to feel alone and we, human beings, are social creatures who craze to ‘belong’ whether in part or wholesomely to some groups.

The problem I always have is I find it difficult to conform for the sake of conformity. For me, a rationale is essential and a convincing one it must be. Without it, I find it difficult to conform with passion. I find it strange that when we are being told to behave in a certain way through pressures from society, organization or peers, we almost always never question. For instance, for many times in my life, I have been told that I must start a family because it will be sad for you not to do so, that that is the only way for you to feel complete as a person and that you need to play a part as being a Singaporean. For most of the people, they probably just conform without question. Please pardon me should I offend you to say that I totally cannot agree with these rationales. I am happy without child, not will be, not may be but I, reiterate, am happy.  In fact in comparison, I am probably happier than many people who have family. Clearly, the rationale needs to be bigger than that. Till today, I couldn’t find one that is convincing enough to me. Hence, I choose to grow old with my spouse. Is there something wrong with that? Nothing. Why then society and peers exert so much pressures on people like us?

In my day to day dealing with people, I realized that people are always uncomfortable about doing something that breaks the tradition or culture. Take for instance, every year I have seen students repeatedly making the same mistake despite our best effort to coach them not to. In my career, seeing people following their intuition and passion at work is a rare event. Often, the reason for that is that people are worry about what others may think of their bold actions.

I am here to offer some of my thoughts as a two-cents worth of advice. Firstly, I strongly believe that we must be courageous to do what we believe is the right thing to do. As long as we are convinced that it is the right thing to do, we should never be afraid to do it. Secondly, doing the right thing doesn’t means that you can ignore the challenges that come with it. This means that you need to be aware that the timing of implementation is the key consideration that ones must carefully plan out. Bear in mind that you are introducing something that differs from the norms and hence it takes time for people to accept it. Once you have considered these facts, you must put your plan into action. Walk your talk. Be coherent in your words and actions.

These thoughts that I have in this blog are inspired by the movie “How do you train your dragon?”. It has been a long time since a movie has inspired me with so much thoughts. It is an entertaining movie with a theme that matches what I am advocating in this article: conformity versus being brave. It warns us of the danger of conforming without a clear understanding of the situation and without a constant review process that question our underlying and deeply embedded assumptions and presumptions. It inspires me to be brave about what I believe in, trust my instinct and continuously seek out opportunity to improve my life as a human being. It brings me comfort and joy that there are like-minded people who also believe that we need to be brave to be different and to do the right thing.

I wish everyone of us, including myself, to be able to acquire the practical wisdom to know when we should conform and when we should be brave enough to go out there and do the right thing.

PS: Please do not quote me if you think that committing a crime or killing yourself is the right thing for you to do.

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