Episode 24: Staying True To Yourself

Peer pressure. Criticism. Trendiness. 

If you know you're doing the right thing and staying true to your code of ethics, can you hold the line even under scrutiny? Dag Hammarskjöld certainly did, and we should, too. 

Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be purchased on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available next summer.

#DagHammarskjöld #ethics #stayingtruetoyourself #standup #decodingtheunicorn #SimplyDag 

Transcript

 Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Dag Hammarskjöld, ethical stance, fortitude, backbone, publishing houses, tone preservation, commercial compromise, author's legacy, code of ethics, lone voice, heated rhetoric, war drum beats, perspective, professional editor, manuscript cleaning.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn Podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

 Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 24 of decoding the unicorn. The podcast, I appreciate you joining me today. It's likely to be a short episode, because I really just want to hone in on standing on your own two feet and standing up for what you know to be right. Doesn't matter if it's popular or trendy. Doesn't matter if everybody else in the room is telling you that they think something different. You have to have a backbone and some fortitude if you know that what you're standing up for is ethical and moral, even if the people around you are making fun of you or throwing rotten tomatoes in your general direction, we need these types of people in society. Dag certainly was one of them. And I think it's important that, whenever possible, we have the same kind of fortitude, the same kind of grit.

Just a reminder, you can find Sara's book Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld on Amazon.com. The link is available in the summary for this episode. And now back to the show.

On a less intense level. This has been on my mind recently because I'm at the point where I need to hire an editor for my next project, simply DAG. It is so intimate. It's so deeply, deeply meaningful to me. I care so much about preserving DAGs tone and DAGs voice. It's like every word, every sentence, has been constructed in such a way to stay authentic to Dag and it absolutely grinds my gears whenever somebody tries to sand him down to make him more commercial. It's infuriating sometimes when you're working with a person who comes from like one of the big box publishing houses, they've worked on major projects. Maybe they have some kind of celebrity clientele. They're definitely going to feel that they know better than you. That's a number one. And even though it's like, well, yeah, I mean, I get it on the commercial side of things, you absolutely do know more than I do. What you don't know is DAGs tone, and I don't want that compromised. I've had all sorts of adventures on this pathway, sometimes to the point of having nightmares, being incredibly frustrated, ready to burst into tears, or like the people in the 1990s infomercials. There's got to be a better way. But I'm persisting, and here's why, because I know that ultimately I'm doing the right thing. It's less important to me about am I doing the right thing for myself? Although that is important, the author of the work matters as well. But the Paramount question for me always is, Am I doing the right thing by DAG? Am I doing the right thing by his tone, his voice, his legacy, by what he wants me to communicate about him in this book? And anybody that compromises that they have to hit the door. I don't care if you've worked for the most exclusive publishing houses. I don't care if you've edited for a list celebrities. I don't care. See those are the things that writers are told that we should care about, these big, important, fancy pedigrees. Guess what? I don't I care about whether or not you're professional. You can do the job appropriately. And can you make sure that DAGs tone his voice and what's being conveyed in a particular scene stays true any writer, I do not care who you are. Jane Austen Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, any author can miss a comma or accidentally misspell a word. It happens to the best of us, and it's important to have a professional with another set of eyes to go through your manuscript and clean up little gremlins. There's a difference between somebody cleaning up your Gremlins versus somebody getting very heavy handed coming in with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel. And I just cannot stand that. It's not something that I want for this particular work. I don't think it needs it for one thing, and I just don't want DAGs tone to be damaged. It means so very much to me. I want to read a short passage from decoding the unicorn. He exhaled a plume of smoke and contemplated what his father told him years before, it's not wise to get addicted to the praise of the press or to crumble under their criticism. You must be your own man. This is certainly something that DAGs father, Hjalmar, experienced in Sweden. He was the Swedish Prime Minister when World War One broke out, and due to the war and rationing and shortages, and also, there were some ships that got way laid that didn't bring supplies that they should have Hjalmar stayed neutral during World War One. And there was a cost to that. There was a cost to that, not only to him, but to Sweden as a whole. And the press smeared him and called him Hungerskjold because of the shortages and long lines to get basic supplies. I'm not saying that it was an easy time for anybody, because it wasn't. What I am saying is that Hjalmar did what he believed to be the correct thing to do, and poor dad took some hits on that as well, because he goes to school and the kids are hearing what their parents are saying around the dinner table, what kind of gossip is going on at home, and they take that to school and they use it to punish DAG. And in fact, there were some boys that assaulted DAG, tried to beat him up over not liking Hjalmar, and it made an impression on dag at an early age, but it didn't make the impression that you would think it didn't turn dag into a conformist. Instead, it only steeled his resolve. It solidified his resolve that if you know you're doing the right thing, if you know that what you're doing is ethical, even if people make fun of you, even if people try to beat you up and engage you in a physical fist fight if you're doing the right thing. That's what really matters. Being that lone voice in the desert that will say, I think we need to reconsider what's happening, or I think we need to take a stand for what's ethical. That's what it's about. We face plenty of decisions in our day to day life, little, small, micro decisions, where this is important, where we have to think about, who do I want to be in this moment? Is this compatible with my code of ethics? Now, that might not sound sexy and fun. This episode is not likely to get a lot of downloads of people thinking, Oh, I'm going to hear something controversial and crazy, and that's fine by me, because it's not about that. It's about are you able to stand on your own two feet, to have a backbone, to have a spine, and to stick by your code of ethics, to do what you feel is right in a given situation, even if it's not popular or trendy, the world needs such people. I look at the drum beats of war, I look at heated rhetoric, and I just think we need more Dag Hammarskjölds in the world. We don't need more vitriol, we don't need more bombast. We don't need more people who are so flexible, they bend any which way the wind blows. We need people with a perspective, a point of view, who are willing to stick by that and say, there's a reason why I feel the way that I do, and I deserve to be heard. Just some food for thought for today. Take good care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode.

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