People pleasing is a fool's errand

So, largely, there are going to be two kinds of people in your life—in anyone's life, really. These are going to be people who are good to you and people who are bad to you. People who you get along with and people who you don't get along with. People who care about you and people who don't care about you or actively dislike you.

The mistake a lot of us make is that, like, let's visually imagine them as two different folders: people who are good to you and people who are not good to you. People who are mean and nasty to you, people who are actively working towards your detriment, and people who care about you, people who want you to do better, people who want to help you, and people who do help you. Right? These are the two broad categories.

The mistake a lot of us make is that we want to live in a world where everyone is in this folder, where everyone is our friend and cares for us and wants to help us. We want these people—the ones who don't care about us—to be in the folder containing people who do want to help us. This is a mistake because it is never going to happen. You are never, ever going to live in a world where everyone likes you, cares for you, and wants to help you.

I call it a mistake because I find a lot of people trying to turn these people into these people. They want to spend time making sure that the people who dislike you become people who like you. I'm not saying it is impossible to do so. I'm just saying that the inordinate amount of time many of us spend doing that is mostly wasted time because you are never going to become absolutely successful at it. And even if you are a little bit successful at it, you will want to be more successful at it. And you're not going to be—it’s not going to be, I put in one effort and I got two result. Therefore, I will put five effort and get 10 result. There is an upper limit to it. Some people are never going to become part of this folder.

Ideally, in a sane world, you would spend more time with these people, right? You would care about the people who care about you. You would want to help them. You would want to do things for them. You would want to understand them better and try to do things that make them happy. But because you're fixated on turning these people into these people, you don't do that. Most of your time is spent on the people who don't like you.

The people who care about you deserve more of your attention. I think we can all agree on this. The people who care about you deserve to spend more time with you. The people who care about you deserve more of your attention and more of your love and more of your care. And yet, because you're fixated on the people who don't like you—people who you are looking to bring into this folder—you don't do that. You take for granted the people who do care about you, and you spend your time on the people who don't care about you.

Taking your loved ones for granted is never a good idea because they don't deserve that. They deserve the best of you. They deserve your time, your effort, and your understanding. But your time, your effort, and your understanding is going in the wrong direction. It is going in the direction of the people who don't really care about all that.

Another side effect of it is that, with every action you take, you are sending a message out into the universe. I don't mean this in a woo kind of way. I'm literally saying that if you are a public personality, or even if you are not a public personality and you simply have a great, large social circle, an extended family, or friend circle, then everything you do that is visible to the people around you sends a message out.

And this message is something you should pay attention to because this is not something you're saying, and yet it is something you're conveying with your actions. So what is the message you send out when you do this thing? You tell the people who want your attention that the best