FTT: Master Yourself
Happy Free Thoughts Thursday, people.
I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but their "red book" has some great insights for both business and life.
My favorite is below:
I might get that graph framed.
1 Thought From Me:
“We must master ourselves unless we’d prefer to be mastered by someone or something else.” — Ryan Holiday
I got bullied when I was a kid.
To be fair, if you'd have sat five year-old me down for the Marshmallow Test I probably would have eaten half the marshmallow, thrown the other half against the ceiling and then broken the plate it was delivered on. Not out of anger. I was just a crazy kid.
That craziness made it hard for me to fit in with my peers who were much more bori— I mean relaxed. I wanted to be a part of the group but I didn't know how to be.
As I got older and realized something was going to have to change if I wanted to make friends, I started to pay attention to other peoples' behavior and observe how they interacted with one another.
Over time, I picked up on their habits and sense of humor and started to learn from their feedback to my actions.
Did they laugh at this joke? Did they get offended by this comment?
Slowly but surely, I became part of the group. I left behind the behaviors other people disliked and implemented new ones they liked.
We're social creatures that reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. It's incredibly useful to do so and is one of the major reasons why we're able to function as a society.
But this can be taken too far by both the people giving feedback and the people receiving it.
As a newly minted member of the group, I wasn't just happy to be there; I was also afraid of getting kicked back out. So, in order to cement my position, I continued to adapt my behavior and I even started picking on kids whose exact position I used to be in myself.
This continued until I got to college and met people who helped me realize what I was doing and inspired me to (mostly) cut the shit and grow up.
I'm sharing this story because it happens to all of us.
We get caught up in what other people think about us and what our social groups expect from us so over time we mold our behavior to meet their standards. It's often a subconscious shift we only recognize after it's happened and we begin to experience cognitive dissonance.
There's a fine line between learning acceptable vs. unacceptable behavior based on other peoples' feedback and fine-tuning your behavior to become the type of person you think other people want you to be (often at the cost of your own values and principles).
What happened to me back in the day and what happens to so many of us is the latter. We want to fit into the group so badly that we mold ourselves into strangers and sometimes we even hurt people along the way.
The truth is, if we give too much weight to what other people think about us and not enough weight to what we think about ourselves, we become slaves to others' opinions.
And nothing good has ever come from that.
Instead of chasing other peoples' approval, maybe we should stop and ask ourselves:
Who do I want to be?
"Look outside and you will see yourself. Look inside and you will find yourself." — Drew Gerald
Live your life to the fullest,
Chris
P.S. Find this interesting it? Please share the link below with others!
P.P.S. Watch my videos on YouTube