From Book 7, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (George Long translation) (Goodreads|review|notes), one of the several thoughts along the lines of "the world outside of you cannot affect you unless you let it":
Everywhere and at all times it is in thy power piously to acquiesce in thy present condition, and to behave justly to those who are about thee, and to exert thy skill upon thy present thoughts, that nothing shall steal into them without being well examined. Do not look around thee to discover other men’s ruling principles, but look straight to this, to what nature leads thee, both the universal nature through the things which happen to thee, and thy own nature through the acts which must be done by thee.
The last half brings to mind a bit from Thoreau's Walden, in "Economy":
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man,—you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind,—I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.
Feel that tension between doing what you're told and explicitly not doing what you're told. The former is what we get paid to do, most of the time, most of us. (In my opinion, etc.) That's OK. The world needs people like that—most of the time, and most of us. The latter is some kind of spectrum, perhaps from laziness to rebellion. (What axis is that?) You need a bit of this as well, but not too much, not from too many people. Surely we play different roles from time to time, but it's not unreasonable to say that we're typically one or the other.
But what if that get-along kind of behavior isn't really part of one's nature? How does one cope? Jazz seems to me, an ignorant outsider, to be some kind of intelligent, thoughtful, controlled anarchy. Do jazz players like to play from sheet music? Boxy 4:4 beats? But that's where they have to start, right? Students learn the music as some kind of structured heritage—the how the what the why—and then, over time, you have the music in you and you can bend it. So if you can drag or pull yourself through the things that aren't you in the conscious pursuit of who you really are, maybe knowing that you're on the way somewhere is how you can handle the parts of the trip you don't want. (And there's plenty of things in Meditations that say you should just deal with the world gladly, whether you're going somewhere you want to or not.)
More, and further afield: from Gary Klein, "Seeing the Invisible", Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making (Goodreads|review|notes):
Knowing how to violate procedures is a type of tacit knowledge
Tension: you can't go off-plan without knowing how and what and why the plan is the way it is. You can't thoughtfully reject something until you understand the thing you're rejecting. (A future post, maybe, about Chesterton's Fence, but in the meantime: Vicky Cosenzo, "Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking", Farnam Street Blog, 2020-03-09)
One more line arises, somewhat unlike the rest, but getting at the point, and I've been waiting for ages to get it out there—Del The Funky Homosapien, "Check It Ooout", from No Need for Alarm:
I love to peep a rhyme / First of all I'm seein' if my man can keep the time / If he go off beat, and it's on purpose / He gotta come back on beat / Or the effort is worthless