For those of you who don’t know me (all one of you 🙂 ), I spend my days trying to help people get jobs – and every once in a while things don’t work out for whatever reason.
What is always interesting to me, is that in most cases, if the employee had simply taken a moment and asked their supervisor, how am I doing, they might have been told “actually Stan, you need to get your production up.”
Instead, people walk around thinking, “I do such a good job. How could they get along without me.” Problem is, that they got along without you before you were there.
I’ve learned that no one is irreplaceable. Sure, change can be hard, but given time, pieces are picked up, and life goes on.
Similarly, I was in DC when the dedicated the new MLK monument in October. On the trip home, I started chatting with someone who was there and asked him how many people were there, and he told me that there were close to two million people in attendance. Well, I got home, and read the articles, which said that there were “tens of thousands” of people.
How exactly do you mistake tens of thousands for millions?
By giving yourself too much credit. No one wants to travel all the way from Atlanta to DC to be with a few thousand people. We want a million people to join us. So we overestimate the importance in our own mind and then how we share it with others.
But who does that really serve? No one, but ourselves, temporarily.
The problem is that then we are living in a false life. I’m not sure if I have ever talked about living in a false life on this blog, but it is a life where we unintentionally lie to ourselves to serve some purpose to try to keep ourselves happy.
However, the problem with false lives is that it is impossible to be happy until we shed our false life and live a real life. I’ll try to explain more about that on the next post.