What Other People Think

Most of what you do to manage other people’s opinions of you doesn’t work.

Not because you’re doing it wrong — but because the thing you’re trying to control isn’t controllable. Other people’s thoughts exist inside them. You can’t reach inside someone’s mind and arrange what they think of you.

The cost you’re paying

The effort to manage perception is exhausting. You choose words carefully, present a version of yourself you think will be received well, hold back things you might want to say. And after all that, you still don’t know what they think — because you can’t.

The Stoics had a simple principle: confine your effort to your domain. Your domain includes your actions, your character, and how you treat people. It doesn’t include how people interpret any of those things.

The difference that changes everything

There’s a difference between caring about how you treat people and caring about how they judge you.

The first is virtue. The second is anxiety with a social costume.

You should care about being honest, kind, fair. You should care a lot less about whether any particular person approves of your honesty, kindness, or fairness. Those are separate things — and conflating them is where most social anxiety lives.

The one action

Today, notice once when you’re about to say or do something primarily to manage someone’s opinion rather than because it’s right.

Just notice it. You don’t have to change it today. But you can’t change what you can’t see — and most people never look.

That’s enough for today.