You Are Nobody. Get Over Yourself.

Here’s a thought that sounds rather depressing at first.

You are nobody.

Nobody cares about you.

Get over yourself.

I don’t mean that nobody loves you, values you or would miss you if you weren’t around. Of course they would. I mean that most people simply aren’t thinking about you anything like as much as you imagine they are.

And once you properly understand that, life gets considerably easier.

We spend an extraordinary amount of time worrying about what other people think of us.

Did I say the wrong thing? Did I look stupid? Why didn’t they reply? Why wasn’t I invited? Do they respect me? Was that comment aimed at me? Am I successful enough? What will people think if I do this?

We walk around with an imaginary audience following us.

The funny thing is that everyone else is doing exactly the same thing.

You walk into a room wondering what everybody thinks about you. Half the people in the room are wondering what you think about them.

Nobody is actually watching the show.

Nobody cares, and that’s good news

Think about the last time you made a fool of yourself.

Perhaps you said something stupid in a meeting. Forgot somebody’s name. Gave a terrible presentation. Sent an email with an embarrassing mistake in it.

You probably thought about it afterwards. You may even remember it years later.

What about everybody else who was there?

They went home.

They thought about what they were having for dinner. Their children. Their mortgage. The argument they’d had with their partner. The strange noise their car was making. What they were doing at the weekend.

Your supposedly catastrophic moment probably disappeared from their minds before lunchtime.

Nobody cares.

And that is wonderfully liberating.

Wear the ridiculous shirt.

Start the business.

Learn a language and get it wrong.

Ask the stupid question.

Publish something that isn’t perfect.

Change career.

Walk into a room where you don’t know anybody and say hello.

Try something you might fail at.

Most people aren’t keeping score. They’re far too busy worrying about their own score.

We take ourselves far too seriously

A lot of everyday unhappiness comes from putting ourselves at the centre of stories that probably aren’t about us at all.

Someone doesn’t reply to your message.

You think they’re ignoring you.

Someone disagrees with your idea.

You think they don’t respect you.

Someone else succeeds.

You wonder what their success says about your own achievements.

You aren’t invited somewhere.

You wonder why they don’t want you.

Someone criticises something you’ve made.

It feels personal.

But perhaps they were busy.

Perhaps they simply disagree with you.

Perhaps somebody else’s success has absolutely nothing to do with yours.

Perhaps they didn’t think to invite you.

Perhaps they genuinely don’t like what you made.

None of these things needs to become a judgement on your worth as a human being.

Sometimes something happens and it really isn’t about you.

This isn’t a new idea

The Stoics understood this rather well.

Marcus Aurelius repeatedly reminded himself how temporary reputation is. The people whose approval we desperately seek will eventually disappear. So will the people who remember them. Eventually, so will we.

That sounds bleak until you look at it from the other direction.

If all of this is temporary, why waste so much of it worrying about whether somebody approves of you?

What matters is what you actually do.

How you behave. How you treat people. Whether you keep your word. Whether you do something useful with the time available to you.

Not whether everybody notices.

There is something wonderfully freeing about accepting your own insignificance.

Being nobody doesn’t mean being worthless

There is an important distinction here.

Saying you are nobody is not the same as saying you are worthless.

You can matter enormously to a handful of people while being completely insignificant to almost everybody else on the planet.

Both things can be true.

Your family cares about you.

Your friends care about you.

The people whose lives you genuinely affect care about you.

Your kindness matters. Your promises matter. Your actions matter.

Your status probably matters considerably less than you think.

And I suspect we’d all be happier if we understood the difference.

Stop trying to be somebody

Something interesting happens when you stop putting so much effort into being somebody.

You have much more time to actually do something.

Criticism becomes information rather than an attack.

Failure becomes something that happened rather than something you are.

Other people’s success becomes less threatening.

You can admit that you don’t know something.

You can change your mind.

You can say, “I was wrong.”

You can try something you might be terrible at.

You can abandon something that isn’t working without worrying about how it looks.

You can stop waiting for somebody else’s permission.

That imaginary audience gradually disappears.

And life becomes a great deal more interesting.

So perhaps we should remind ourselves occasionally:

You are nobody.

Nobody cares about you nearly as much as you think they do.

Get over yourself.

Then go and live your life.

Because the great paradox is that accepting that you are nobody doesn’t make your life smaller.

It gives you the freedom to make it much bigger.