Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think (Taming the Mammoth)
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Highlights
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We share a collective insanity that pervades human cultures throughout the world: An irrational and unproductive obsession with what other people think of us.
- With so much thought and energy dedicated to the mammoth’s needs, you often end up neglecting someone else in your brain, someone all the way at the center—your Authentic Voice.
- Your AV is also someone the mammoth tends to ignore entirely. A strong opinion from a confident person in the outside world? The mammoth is all ears. But a passionate plea from your AV is largely dismissed until someone else validates it.
- When you don’t know who you are, the only decision-making mechanism you’re left with is the crude and outdated needs and emotions of your mammoth.
- When it comes to the most personal questions, instead of digging deep into the foggy center of what you really believe in to find clarity, you’ll look to others for the answers. Who you are becomes some blend of the strongest opinions around you.
- Losing touch with your AV also makes you fragile, because when your identity is built on the approval of others, being criticized or rejected by others really hurts.
- But in today’s world, no matter who you are, a bunch of people will like you and a bunch of other people won’t.
- The irony of the whole thing is that the obsessive lumbering mammoth isn’t even good at his job. His methods of winning approval may have been effective in simpler times, but today, they’re transparent and off-putting. The modern world is an AV’s world, and if the mammoth wants to thrive socially, he should do the thing that scares him most—let the AV take over.
- And if they’re smart and innovative enough, they can change things in the world and invent things that disrupt the status quo.
- people respect someone with the strength of character to have tamed their mammoth.