Success

Success attracts people. Failure repels them.

That’s the illusion we carry — that people are drawn to us, or pull away from us. They are not. There is nothing about us that changes from Tuesday to Wednesday. What changes is our success and our failure. Our associations. Our network. Our material possessions, or the lack of them.

So there is no reason to feel good when people move closer, and no reason to feel bad when they keep their distance. What we’re watching, in both cases, is not our worth. It’s our perceived image in society at that moment — nothing more.

Neither we nor that image is permanent. Both are subject to change. There will be peaks. There will be troughs.

The mistake is treating those peaks and troughs as verdicts. They are not verdicts. They are weather.

People will come in and go out of your life on the tide of how you’re currently perceived. Let them. But don’t let their coming and going set the terms for what you’re building. Your mission doesn’t answer to the tide. Neither should you.

Hold the line on what you actually set out to do — the goals, the dreams, the work that was never about being liked in the first place. Everything else is just people responding to your weather, not to you.