Deborah Hill Cone: When the best advice is our own

In front of me I have a small laminated square of cardboard with "Mistakes are okay: they help me learn" on it. It's intended for my kids, aged 7 and 10, who both have a mean perfectionist streak; I sometimes fear they are going to fire me.

Even so, I have decided I need this reminder card more. I'm writing a book and if I think too much about it I dissolve into a puddle of drippiness and can't write at all. (My other anti-drippy mantra this week: "Write something you would not show to your mother and father." Mine are dead and even so I get paralysed with mortification.)

I know I said previously in this column that I was going to write a book and, yeah, well what happened to that, eh? It's like declaring you're on a diet and resolutely staying fat. I'm the same size, but something else has changed in me and this time I might finish a book.

I also have an actual 17-page book contract. That is, the contract is 17 pages long, not the book I'm supposed to write, unfortunately. Shall I tell you what's changed? Or I could write about other important things this week. (Ahem: banning books is dangerous. Not least because in the case of Into the River we look like a nation of halfwits. I became a sex fiend after reading Judy Blume's Forever and I am grateful for that.) But I can't help it, I feel an evangelist's fervour to share my new discovery. Here it is.

I realise I have been held captive my entire life by my unfortunate tendency to "miswant". That means to desire things which we won't like once we get them.

We can never escape from choice itself — we are doomed to choose — but we can choose what we won't care about, including public approval. We could all be a bit more like Diogenes (cynic, founder of stoicism, didn't give a fig).

We don't have to go and live in a barrel, or a large ceramic jar according to other accounts, but instead of complaining and expecting others to be kinder, maybe we would be better off learning to suck up social failure and ridicule. I don't mean in a fearless Rachel Glucina hate-me-I-dare-you way, more like learning to observe public criticism with amused detachment.

I'm not going off Facebook this time, but I am going to try from now on not to shame anyone else and not to feel shame myself.

I have come to the brutal realisation you cannot expect to be yourself and have society approve or like you. You must choose one or the other. And I'm choosing to be myself.

"A man who feels no need to live in society must be either a beast or a God," Aristotle said. So I guess I'm a beast. Got a problem with that? Well, guess what? I don't care.

Because I've realised if you are willing to accept "crazy" as part of your nickname "you can live the life of your own choosing rather than having to conform to the expectations of those around you", as philosophy professor William Irvine says. "Voluntary eccentrics are willing to run the risk of being thought mad because they appreciate the tremendous freedom an eccentric lifestyle can yield."

Academics who have studied eccentrics found they were healthier and happier than "normal" people, maybe because they weren't engaged in "miswanting" overpriced modernist furniture, ridiculous European light fittings or public approval.

Truly, you can be happier by limiting the number of people whose opinions you value. Although, in our super-connected online world this takes conscious choice and effort.

You can't dabble in letting your freak flag fly.

If someone's experiment with eccentricity doesn't pan out and he returns to conformity, the world will remember his brief rebellion and be disinclined to trust him, having stained his conformist credentials, especially "in the business world where dull grey conformity is typically a key to success", Professor Irvine warns.

Notice how all those business leaders who declare passionately that they embrace failure as concomitant with success still try really, really hard to have their kids go to the "right" schools?

You have to let your arrogance go and embrace diminished social status if you are prepared to look inside and be who you really are. I may be mistaken, but that is the only way you learn.

Actually, I may laminate some extra "Mistakes are okay; they help me learn" cards and hand them out. Any takers?