No Leaders Please

About the Poem

“No Leaders, Please” is a poem that encourages people to “invent [themselves] and reinvent [themselves]”. In other words, the poem encourages one to be who one wants to be, but change oneself accordingly. In other words, life is not stagnant, and people accordingly go through changes their character according to experience. The poem gives the idea that if one stays stagnant throughout one’s life, he or she is not truly experiencing life. The poem states to “stay out of the clutches of mediocrity”; in other words, if one is not changing oneself accordingly, one is being what everyone else him or her to be rather than finding out for his or herself. If one is simply acting how everyone expects him or her to act, that person is “in the clutches of mediocrity” because he or she is not discovering themselves or “being self-taught”. In other words, one is not finding themselves by being themselves because he or she is living by what others expect. For example, singer and songwriter David Bowie “invented himself and reinvented himself” throughout his career, and his fans loved that about him. He stayed relevant by “inventing himself and reinventing himself”, and fans remember him most for his remarkable stage presence and his multiple personas. This was because David Bowie discovered new parts of himself that he incorporated in his stage presence and music. Others should do this as well to discover themselves.

Impact and Values

Although I really like this poem and see that it has relevant values I should teach my students, I had mixed feeling about it while reading it. I liked that it encouraged others to depend on yourself. In other words, I liked the “know who you are” message that the poem conveys. At the same time, when I read the phrase “invent yourself and reinvent yourself”, I feel like the poem encourages people to change themselves constantly so that others do not know who they are anymore. However, after reading it a couple more times and hearing it read, I think that it is not about having multiple personalities. Rather, it is about to think about the multiple experiences one has that contribute to one’s identity that cause one to “invent oneself and reinvent oneself”. In other words, it is not about having one personality one day and having a different one the next. It is experiencing different things in one’s life that contribute to a person’s singular identity. Although David Bowie has multiple personas, they all contribute to who David Bowie is as a person.

Significance to My Students

Like the poem suggests, “No Leaders, Please” teaches students to “be self-taught” and develop their own identity based on experience. It also teaches students to be unique so that “no one can categorize them”. In other words, students should be who they want to be rather than what everyone expects them to be. If students invent themselves based on one singular image, no one will get to know the student for who they really are because everyone believes that they are defined by single image. No one is getting to know who the real person is because that person has not taken the time to reinvent oneself. Thus, students should be who they want to be because if they only live by one image, they are not being true to themselves by not discovering themselves. To contribute to the world, one must discover themselves to make that contribution that they will make to the world with their own unique characteristics.