Crippled CEO Blog #110:
You are less important than you think.
Wait, that sounded terrible. This is supposed to be helpful.
Let’s try again.
You don’t have to worry about looking silly for taking a risk, for pursuing a dream, because people care about what you do less than you think.
Seriously. It’s science.
It is a psychological phenomenon called the Spotlight Effect.
We are the heroes of our own stories, so we assume that we must be a big deal in everybody else’s, also.
But we’re not.
Mainly because they are doing the exact same thing.
And even when we logically realize that other people don’t think about us as much as we think about ourselves, because of another psychological phenomenon known as anchoring, we still overestimate our impact.
A study was done where they had participants wear “embarrassing“ T-shirts to a restaurant. They then had the participants guess how many people noticed the shirts. Even though the participants tried to pick a conservative number, understanding what was going on, they STILL guessed too high.
No one notices. Nobody cares.
Except me. I notice everything. But you don’t care what I think, anyways.
I really like watches. Add this phenomenon is well known in the watch community. People stress about which watch to wear, worried what people will think, but the truth is that nobody notices.
But it doesn’t just go for appearance. It’s true for everything. People also care less about your successes and your failures than you think.
They’re not up at night thinking about how your last endeavor flopped.
You could take this as kind of depressing — no one thinks about you.
But, in reality, it’s liberating. It means you can do whatever you want and, as long as you’re not hurting anybody, nobody will think much of it. You can do what you want for you without worrying about other opinions. They don’t have any.
You’re the only one judging you all the time, so why not do the thing that will make you happy and proud of yourself? Go ahead and please the only audience that’s paying attention. No one else cares, anyways.
(You know who definitely doesn’t care what other people think? Your mom. Last night. She’s also smart enough to get a link to this blog every Sunday. Send a text to 484848 with the word CRIP as the message and you can, too.)
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