#18: IMPRESS YOURSELF, NOT OTHERS

First, let me start off by letting you know that I was terrible at trying not to impress others.

Impressing people was something I loved doing. It gave me this I'm-a-cool-guy kinda vibe that made me feel as though I'm on top of the world.

But it's all bullshit. It took me time to realize that instead of impressing people, I should be impressing myself.

You may think I'm being self centred but I'm not because when I tell people to impress themselves, not others, they start thinking something is wrong with me.

The idea sounds counterintuitive but if you try to understand it, you'll see that it makes a lot of sense.

See, doing things to impress others is not good. It usually ends in a vicious circle that keeps going and going—one that messes up your life by making you place your happiness and everything on others.

People who are bent on trying to impress people often end up messing their lives in indefinite proportions.

I'm not saying impressing people is not good. All I'm saying is most of us use the wrong metrics as a measure of impressing people.

Here's how I think you should do it...

Instead of trying to impress that top notch babe in your class by looking clean and dressing all nice, why not make it a habit to just look clean and nice always. Why not make it a default part of who you are.

That said, even if this babe doesn't like you in return, you won't stop looking clean and dressing nice.

Instead of honing your social skills so that people will like you, why not do it with the aim of becoming a better version of who you are.

That said, you'll derive fulfillment in who you are becoming instead of becoming a fake who's trying to make others like him by all means.

Instead of being generous to people so as to receive accolades, why not make generousity an instrinsic feature of who you are

Isn't it better?

If you check it out, you'd see that if you're being generous because of praises, you'd eventually stop being generous the moment people stop sending those accolades.

Instead of trying to impress people by doing all sorts of things, it's better to make it an intrinsic feature of who you're to naturally do things, not because you want to impress someone, but because it's part of who you are.

When you do so, you'll impress people without even trying to impress people.

It's as simple as that.

In this context, the more you do things to impress people, the more you place your happiness on people—placing your happiness on people is a superficial form of happiness. It can backfire at any point.

True happiness come from within. It comes from purifying your intentions and doing things for the sake of you enjoy doing it and not because you're doing it to impress others.

So when next time you want to do something, try to see it from this perspective.