A Quote by Douglas Coupland
I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.
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I used to spend so much time reacting and responding to everyone else that my life had no direction. Other people's lives, problems, and wants set the course for my life. Once I realized it was okay for me to think about and identify what I wanted, remarkable things began to take place in my life.
It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
My greatest influences are actually probably a set of different teachers. And these teachers, most prominently at my high school, but also a few others, helped kind of instill in me, thinking thoughts about how life is meaningful in terms of how we all kind of live in a network of people and how you interact with those people is part of what makes life essentially meaningful and then kind of concepts to think about, how do you add value to other people's lives? How do they add value to yours? And how do you kind of form a community together in the network?
Of course, you see your body changing as you age, but it's more important to live than be too preoccupied with that sort of thing. I think ultimately what people care about in other people is the energy, the spirit.
In my own personal experience in my life, people that I argue with or have confrontations with are the people I love and care about the most. I wouldn't think to argue with somebody I couldn't give two s**ts about. There's no point in arguing if you don't care.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
I think my children have presented one of the biggest lessons so far in my life. It was only when my kids were born that I realized just how much I'd been living my life worried about what everybody thought of me and, even more strangely, worried about what I imagined other people might be thinking about me.
I don't really care what other people see me as. I seriously don't. I've always worried about what my opinion of myself is. And I've always thought that it carries most weight. So I don't care what other people's opinion of me is or how they view whatever I've said or done.
I think I've wasted some of my time, but used most of it well, and have realized that my life is not separate from other people's lives or from the universe. I think our moments of happiness really come from a feeling of unity.
What I have learned from the teachers with whom I have worked is that, just as there is no simple solution to the arms race, there is no simple answer to how to work with children in the classroom. It is a matter of being present as a whole person, with your own thoughts and feelings, and of accepting children as whole people, with their own thoughts and feelings. It's a matter of working very hard to find out what those thoughts and feelings are, as a starting point for developing a view of a world in which people are as much concerned about other people security as they are about their own
I think we've created a system here where only the lifelong politicians, who are used to this kind of life in the spotlight and don't care, or people who have egos along the lines of Donald Trump - who just don't care what people say about them - they're the only people who are ever going to run because nobody wants their life dissected as meanly and as randomly as our media has come to do with anybody who runs for office.
Life's too short and too complicated for people behind desks, people behind masks to be ruining other people's lives, initiating force against other people's lives on the basis of their income, their color, their class, their religious beliefs, whatever.
Our own personal salvation is to say, "I'm not going to judge myself, or let other people judge me, by my economic worth." We can't, obviously, control how other people will judge us, but - Life's too short to worry about those things. We can't control those things, but we can control how we feel about ourselves. And we work towards that. To say, "My life has been a success. Even if my bank account doesn't indicate it."
You can't please everyone. When you're too focused on living up to other people's standards, you aren't spending enough time raising your own. Some people may whisper, complain and judge. But for the most part, it's all in your head. People care less about your actions than you think. Why? They have their own problems!
Fear of what other people will think is the single most paralyzing dynamic in business and in life. The best moment of my lifewas the day I realized that I know longer give a damn what anybody thinks. That's enormously liberating and freeing, and it's the only way to live your life and do your business.
Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.
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