The lessons of being divergent

At the February event, we gathered virtually once more to talk about this month’s theme: Divergent. We hosted the incredible Filipa Maia, who shared about how she has lived divergently her life and what lessons this approach has given her.

Filipa’s life journey has been all about divergency. She is a former scientist, having once worked in the development of new pharmaceuticals and now she has a career  as an online business mentor. This was a major change in Filipa’s life. However, she would say her first divergent act was to decide to write books. She had always believed that she wasn’t creative, so this creative act went against how she defined herself. Ultimately, however, she saw it was a misconception to think that as a woman of science she did not have the skills or the insights to become a writer. Through her first act of breaking the accepted narrative, she became a writer.

That first step led her to leave her job as a pharmaceutical scientist, but without knowing which business to start, nor even how. To Filipa, it was only important that whatever business it was, it should lead her to have time to write. She is passionate about storytelling and how stories are woven by characters, conflict and resolution, all being triggered by active decisions. She rapidly understood that the stories that she loved the most were dystopias, where the protagonists are active and divergent, like some utopia gone wrong. She admired each divergent protagonist and their commitment to break away from made-up and imposed narratives. Through dystopian stories and divergent protagonists, Filipa shared with us five lessons about how to be divergent creatives:

• Lesson 1: Don’t let yourself become numb. Wake up. Pay attention. Don’t just do what is expected, what everyone else is doing. Think and be critical. - Book: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
• Lesson 2: Blind obedience is not a virtue. It’s at the root of many terrible things that have happened throughout history. - Book: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
• Lesson 3: Don’t let others convince you that we are separate. Separation is at the root of all evil. Realize we are all the same, we are all one. - Book: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
• Lesson 4: Don’t believe everything you hear or read, even if it seems to come from a credible source. Information can be manipulated. Look into it, dig deeper, investigate for yourself. - Book: 1984 by George Orwell.
• Lesson 5: Don’t believe that you have to be just one thing, don’t accept labels - be divergent, be everything you want to be. Book: Divergent by Veronica Roth.

To Filipa the definition of being divergent is all about thinking for yourself, not doing what everyone else is doing, making your own decisions, asking questions, undertaking critical thinking and not remaining in a situation just because you’ve chosen it in the past. It seems a lot, but I think it all comes down to being true to your inner self and following your instinct. In that way,  you’ll have it all! Thank you so much Filipa for your sharings. It was such a cool and structured talk. Let us all be divergent!

Text by Ana Sousa

Photos by  Irina Konova and Sónia Ramalho