Do what makes you happy and stop oversharing

Do what makes you happy and stop oversharing. No one else is going to chase your dreams for you. You have to start doing what makes you happy, not what makes the people around you happy or proud. Because you can't do it for others, or external modifications like praise because that will eventually eat at your soul. You have to do it for yourself. You have to be content doing it even if no one else in the world sees you doing it or your accomplishments other than you.

If you’ve been dangling the “promise of guaranteed success” in front of yourself as motivation, I hope you can find a way to replace it with “pride in your work” as the reason to keep going and doing the very best you can. [^1]

You can't focus on what other people are thinking and what they are thinking about you. Because, news flash, they aren't thinking about you, not as much as your little ego would like to believe they are. No one truly cares what you are doing. They only care if what you are doing reflects badly on their own lives and their assumptions and expectations of what you should do or be. FYI, that's a narcissistic trait if someone other than yourself is trying to control your life and the decisions you make.

Stop caring about external outcomes or results or the audience. Only your opinion matters. If you like it and like doing it. Great! Forget everyone else.

Now I'm not saying you need to become a hermit to achieve your dreams. I'm saying don't tell everyone and their dog that you are doing it or going to do it. The way to tell people that you are chasing your dreams or goals is through results. Want to lose weight? Don't tell anyone your goal, just take action, and then wait for someone to say, damn, you look good or you have lost so much weight. The same goes for any other goal; wait for the response, not the approval.

The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, [^2]

When you stop going after external validation, you start getting validation and satisfaction from your own internal motivations and results. Do you think that I tell everyone that I'm a writer? Nope, my family doesn't even know that I've been writing this blog part time since 2015. Only the people that read it know it exists. Because I'm writing for myself, I get so much reward from writing, typing down my thoughts and what I've learned. And no external validation comes close to the internal motivation of doing the thing. So like I said before, do what makes you happy and stop oversharing because the only approval you should care about, is your very own.

Footnotes

1. The Meaning in the Making by Sean Tucker
2. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield