“Have the courage to use your own intelligence.”
— Immanuel Kant
If you’ve had a unique language and way of thinking and living for the first 25 years of your life, and then angry, uneducated, military-like men march into your life and tell you you’re wrong, & they try forcing their beliefs into you, would you submit?
Sort of like what the Europeans did to the Indians.
Or they march into your life and tell you that you are correct – but they hate it! And they want to change you to be like them.
It happens more often than you can imagine. Conformity has always been a stronger gravitational pull than beating to the sound of your own drums.
Einstein said, “Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.”
It is almost always fear within a person that guides them to conform.
And when you conform, you lose your independence. You stop seeing the world with your own eyes & you start seeing the world from someone else’s perspective.
Many people want that though – they want to be led, and that is okay.
But if you’re going to be an authentic leader, you must DARE to use your own intelligence.
With Ken Thompson 