In what world does a lowly lieutenant colonel give a half-dozen top-secret briefings to four-star generals, then go back to paper pushing and being refused computer time by civilians after being passed over for promotion for years?

In a place where bureaucracy knocks heads with the warrior spirit; where ideas must be rubberstamped in ink by politicized officials before they see the light of day. The Pentagon.

The fighter pilot turned strategist John Boyd, that lowly lieutenant colonel, saw the Catch-22 inherent to his Air Force career. Would he choose reputation at the expense of making tangible changes, or tangible changes at the expense of reputation?

To Be or To Do?

Boyd’s choice was clear: he would revolutionize air tactics and fighter jet design while mentoring some of the greatest fighter pilots of the 20th century. The cost? Relative obscurity as a low-level colonel in retirement with a family in tatters thanks to the battles he wages against the U.S. military industrial complex. But I doubt he would do it any differently given the chacne.

As millennials (or maybe just 21st century Americans), we are hardwired to ask and answer this simple question we’re asked repeatedly. What do you want to be when you grow up? Yet this is the wrong question. It implies that becoming someone automatically means you did something of worth, when the reality isn’t so simple.

In the process of being or becoming someone, we tend to become enamored by the glittery image of what we suppose success looks like. For me that might be owning a house I designed or having enough money where paying for my kids’ tuition is a drop in the bucket; for you that might be opening an art gallery for charity or tithing enough that the 10% you give accounts for 10% of the entire church budget.

What success looks like isn’t the point; the key is to know that it’s almost-idolatrous imagery can just as easily creep into mind under the guise of benevolence as the poison of extravagance. It seduces us to chasing symbols of being: the title, followers, paycheck, or praise; rather than striving To Do. We become the suit, instead of the person who wears it.

The great UCLA men’s basketball coach John Wooden would always end his pregame locker room address with the same rhetorical statement: “Well, I’ve done my job.” It’s a command adopted by other coaches from Bill Belichick to Nick Saban to Sean Payton and distilled even further: “Do your job.”

An analogy would be to see the Manziel-ing off the field as emblematic of being the star: the enigmatic first-round pick quarterback celebrating at the club because now that an NFL team has called his name, he must be someone. Versus the star that does: the one who does his job on the field. She does things.

Today is just a moment in a lifetime, but life is made up of moments. How you do anything will be how you do everything. There is always the temptation to take the straightest lined path to becoming someone and foregoing the tedious doing part in the process. Contemporary society’s fascination with image-creation exacerbates this; Fake it till you make it. Market yourself right. Find your niche that’s unique to you.

And so we sit on the ridge overlooking the bright lights of our Hollywood dreams, asking aloud, What is the meaning of my life…, as if an answer will follow from the silence that comes. But as Viktor Frankl, Auschwitz survivor and psychotherapist turned philosopher put it, we have no right to demand that the world for an answer. Instead, life demands an answer from us: How will you answer that question? What purpose will you create with your choices? What will you do?

We conflate meaning with being, as if being president or a CEO signals we really did something for more than ribbons and promotions. And its those bells and whistles—the corner offices, name plaques, awards, and the like—that blind us to our own priorities: What I need to be doing, right here, right now. Because in that blindness, whether the result of our own initial success or that of others, we become ensnared in the rat races that either don’t matter or exist.

A maxim that has stuck with me since middle school has been, when talking about someone not present, to say only things I would be comfortable saying to the person directly to their face. Ironically, the most difficult person to apply this to has been myself. Honestly telling yourself of its ignorance, misperceptions, and shortcomings is far more challenging than to avoid saying such things about others when they’re not around.

All this to say that typing these words feels as much as self-admonition as sharing a perspective. I’m in the process of shedding false idols of “successful” people that aren’t really so relative to my own north star. Of chasing dreams by doing, rather than trying to be. Of nurturing an infant euthymia, or the quiet confidence that Seneca called “the belief that you’re on the right path and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost.”

So what will it be? To Be or To Do?