Throughout my life I’ve found that the things I look back on with regret, more often than not, are the product of actions I took or things I said to impress someone.
In some cases, it was a product of trying to impress the wrong people, and in other cases it was trying to impress the right people with the wrong things….which inevitably lead back to habits I developed trying to impress the wrong people.
Be careful who you surround yourself with and whose approval you care about. No matter how many times I’ve said that “I don’t care what other people think”, that’s only half the truth. In some cases I very much did care what other people thought, people whose opinions I shouldn’t have cared about. In other cases, what I meant was that I don’t care what everyone thinks. I’m being selective about whose opinion matters to me.
A good rule to follow would be, if my actions to impress someone are going to harm someone else, maybe I should pause and rethink things.
You get to decide whose opinion matters. Be careful with that power.
