To Care Or Not To Care?

[Supa]

TL;DR: care about others, but not about everyone's opinion.

One of the most important things to do (in my opinion), before you can really offer value to others, is to care about others. But if you gonna read 'don't care' in the next few lines, it won't be a typo (oh boy, now I gonna need to re-read everything in case there's really a typo...), just keep reading and you'll know what the paradoxic f*ck I'm talking

Care but don't Care
I won't go into detail about the importance of caring about others, since I already did that in another thread, TL;DR of this thread was: to be able to offer value to others, you should first care about others.

But this time I'm telling you to not care, and nope I'm not prone to mood swings. While you should care about others, you shouldn't care about others' opinions on what you do. Yeah the old 'don't give a shit what others think about you' but if it would be that simple, I could've written that sentence in the title and leave the post field blank. There's more to it than simply walking around not giving a shit about anything.

I was really really prone to the desire to make everyone think good of me. Bought new shoes, went to school with them the next day, just thinking 'oh boy oh boy I hope the others like those shoes' or working a bank job because it was everyone else's opinion that it was a good job; 'I hate this job, but it has to be me, since everyone else thinks it's dope and how happy I should be about it...' One of the biggest fears I always had was that others could think bad of me. Of course that's probably normal as a teenager, but often times this mindset is something that moves with you, if you grow into an adult, making you buy an awesome car to make others envious of you, or that brand new flat screen that will make your friends say 'wow!' the next time you're watching football. @Andy Black sometimes uses a great quote to sum this up "we buy things we don't need, to impress people we don't know".

First Off All...
I'm sorry if I gonna hurt your feelings now but, first off all you have to understand that Nobody. Gives. A. F*ck.

While your friends may shout a 'wow!' at your new tv, or rub their fingers around the leather seats in your brand new (probably leased) BMW, they actually don't really care about it. Yeah they care about it the second you show it to them; but did you ever think about your friend's new car just a single second after the topic of it disappears? I don't. I never found myself sitting there thinking 'wow his new car is so awesome, the leather seats, the xenon lights, the blablabla'

The people you show your brand new car are more likely to think 'oh look at him bragging again' or 'ah his parents just give him too much money' most probably won't think 'oh I'm so glad for him, that he's doing better than me!'

Ok ok, I get it, I just should stop caring about the opinions of others, you may think now, great right? Now you can hit the like button and before you leave hit that Rep+ button too to send me a few hundred bucks (jk ), but I'm sorry to disappoint you, the following dot won't be the last one in this post.

Still with me? Great.

Now imagine where you would be in your life, without listening to and accepting someone's opinion, probably not here on the forum reading this; at least you wouldn't be here without listening to MJ's opinion and accepting it right?

There are opinions you definitely should listen to, but how do you find those between the ones you should avoid?

"What's Your Reality?"
before accepting someone's opinion on you or what you're doing, you should ask yourself "what's his/her reality? Is it one that fits my goals?"

Let's say you do a progress thread on here and MJ responds to your latest post in it, while thinking about his words ask yourself: is MJ's reality one that fits to my goals? A Fastlane business? Financial Freedom? Since you're here, the answer probably is yes. In this case you should listen to his opinion on what you're doing.

Now what about your uncle giving you advice on how to live a great future, after telling him what you're doing currently? Is his reality one that fits to your goals? A 9-5 with every friday off at 2pm (wohoo!... lol)? An awesome BMW for a 'small' amount of $500 per month? I think (and hope) the answer to this question will be a capital NO.

In other words, before you accept someone's opinion and maybe even act on it, make a quick reality check, if their reality is one that you want yours to be similar to, or if their reality is one that makes you shit your pants, when thinking about it being yours.

I don't give advice on how to run a successful business, because I don't run one myself yet. But if I would post that kind of advice, and you run your reality check, I would fail that test.

To leave you as confused as you may have been at the start of this post, ask yourself this question: "should I care about this guy's opinion on caring about others' opinions?"

 

Dislike ads? Become a Fastlane member: Subscribe today and surround yourself with winners and millionaire mentors, not those broke friends who only want to drink beer and play video games. :-)