I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.
So much more respect have we to what our neighbors shall think of us than to what we shall think of ourselves.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Twelve (section 4), translated by George Long (1862)
Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman Empire, and he still caught himself doing this. We care about ourselves more than anyone, and yet we trust other people's verdict on us over our own.
You see it everywhere. A business leader rewrites a LinkedIn post five times and still gets nervous about publishing it. A parent second guesses their appearance because of one strange look at the school gate. A DJ plays from a predictable set list and sticks to one genre of music, instead of following their gut, playing the music they love and taking the dance floor somewhere no other DJ would.
Don't get me wrong. Feedback matters. Clients, partners and friends see things you miss. Marcus Aurelius is asking about weight. Whose opinion gets the final say on what you're worth?
I know where my own answer starts.
When my book Done Beats Perfect first came out, I was getting great feedback. DMs from people, five-star reviews left on Amazon. And then one of the reviews said this:
Starts well, then loses focus and meanders somewhat.
That was five years ago, and it's still the review that rings through my head the most.
In those five years I've had countless people come up to me at events and tell me how great the book is. In fact, one person told me recently that they're dyslexic and they have problems reading. Yet they found my book easy to read, because it felt like a conversation they were having with me. That's the way I tried to write it.
There's an irony that a book about procrastination could have reached a point where I never published it, because I was always trying to make it better. Maybe the reviewer was right. Maybe the first half of the book was better than the second half. I've considered going back and updating it a few times, and maybe one of these days I will.
Here's the reality, though. If I hadn't hit publish when I did, nobody would have given me feedback. And the people who've told me the book has had a really positive impact on their lives? That wouldn't have happened either. Do I wish I'd waited longer and edited the book more? Actually, no, I don't.
When it came to getting that book out during the pandemic, I backed myself. If I think back to when I was at school, I was the least likely person to become an author. But as an adult I felt I had a message I wanted to share, and so I made that happen.
Marcus leaves us with a few questions worth sitting with:
- Whose opinion of you have you given more weight than your own?
- When did backing your own judgement against the room pay off?
- What would you start this week if the only opinion that counted was yours?
For that last one, my answer is the book again. Maybe it would be the update to Done Beats Perfect. Or maybe it would be starting my next one.
Maybe it's time you looked back at the week you've just had. Find the moment when someone else's reaction made you second guess yourself, or when you let them make a decision for you. Write it down, and next to it write what, with hindsight, you'd have done instead.
