David McElroy

I’ve never worried about my status in the world. I was always so confident about myself that I never tried to make people like me and I never worried about where I fit in a hierarchy.

Some people liked me. Some people didn’t like me. I had friends. Some hated me. But everybody knew where I fit wherever I was.

As a child, I was the leader of the groups I ran with, but I never really thought about it. In school, I had high status in classrooms because I was typically the new “smartest kid in class” when I moved to a new town. I was acknowledged as a leader.

In high school, I won top leadership positions in the things I cared about, at school and church. I wasn’t the most popular kid, but I was the one you wanted in charge to get things done. On my early jobs, I had quick status. I was the youngest managing editor of a daily newspaper in the country at 21. I was younger than all the people I managed.

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When people look at me, they see an illusion. They don’t see the real me.

That’s true of you, too. Some of what others see in us is the illusion we project. Another big part of what they see — probably the biggest part — comes from their unconscious assumptions about human beings. And a bit of it is actual truth that leaks out through the cracks in the masks we wear.

You could spend your life studying one solitary person — as a full-time job — and still not understand every single thing there is to know about that person. Humans are too complex on the inside. We often have little understanding of ourselves. Even the best of us keep discovering new things that later seem obvious.

Since it’s impossible to know another person completely — and few are even interested — it’s natural that we would develop quick abstractions for those we see around us. We project what we want to see onto those we perceive as good or even ideal. We project what we expect to see (or fear we’ll see) onto those we perceive as bad. We go through life with this rough shorthand about others. It’s horribly inaccurate, but it’s good enough to allow us to survive.

Most people go through life believing they are known and understood by others — and that they know others, too. Some of us know better, though, and that leaves us feeling unbearably alone.

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I found you a thousand times
Guess you’ve done the same
But then we lose each other
It’s just like a children’s game
— Harry Chapin, “Circle”

I’ve had a terrible week. It wouldn’t look that way from the outside, but I’ve felt tortured inside.

It started Monday with a disagreement over the way I’ve managed a part of my company’s investment real estate. There was no argument. There was nothing nasty. It was just a philosophical disagreement that I’ve bumped up against numerous times in the last couple of years.

I’m confident about my approach and about the financial results I’ve consistently achieved with the property, but an investor was fretting about some expenses I was approving for maintenance and repairs. Investors never like to spend money — and I felt the icy judgment of his disapproving words. It felt like a personal attack, even though it wasn’t personal. I seriously wanted to quit. Right then and there.

The next day, I reported some income figures to the same investor. He was ecstatic, because I was bringing in cash better than he ever had when he managed the property for himself. He praised me, as he’s done on other occasions — and I felt elated.

Then the clear truth hit me. My self-worth is far too tied up in whether I make someone happy with me or not. I can be incredibly high or disturbingly low, depending on whether someone approves of me. And it’s not emotionally healthy to be affected that way.

I’ve learned this lesson a hundred times, but I keep forgetting — just as I forget dozens of important lessons — so I keep having to learn them all over again.

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