As much as I would love to impress people with my talent, I found this pursuit leads to misery. We all like to be loved and adored. We seek this endless path leading us to emptiness and exhaustion.

Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I could not know the difference between admiration and love.  I did a lot of stupid things to impress girls and people who I did not know or even care about. I spent many wasted hours thinking about this, leading me to lose my self-confidence. This habit of trying to impress people continued even when I was an adult — after all, the habits and beliefs formed in our teenage years can still manifest themselves in later years in life. Adult people are diving into this behavior more and more nowadays. The continuous striving to impress people paralyzes us from moving and living peacefully. People spend hours impressing others which they really don’t care about.

How did this happen?  How did most of us drift in this direction without even noticing?  TV, social media, and fast culture are to blame.  All the ads push us in that direction. When we do, we end up spending money and driving ourselves to a shallow life of materialism.  We even have a name for that– keeping up with the Joneses!   Impressing people is not wrong, but we need to think about who we like to impress and why.  I love to impress my wife!  I love to impress my son! These people are very important to me. I don’t need to impress my parents — they are always impressed!

On the other hand, I love to be impressed by the smart behavior of people.  I am always impressed with great books and great ideas.  I am impressed by the hard work of people around me.  I make sure that these people know how thankful or impressed I am.  This inspires them to maintain their good work.  It allows them to do the right thing of moving and raising the standard of intellectual thinking. Every Friday, I send three to four emails telling people how thankful I am for their hard work and the creativity they showed.

One of the most important habits a leader can develop is to recognize the work of employees.  I now focus on finding work of people which can impress me rather than impressing people with my behavior.  We all have to spend the time to think about this to change our paradigm — telling people that you are impressed with their great talent is more important than spending the time looking for things to impress them.

As I move forward with this thought that to spend more time being impressed is way better than impressing people, I am becoming a more balanced human being.

Thank you for reading my post. I would love to hear from you. (Sufalkhaldi@futureandsciencehacks.com). This post is always published on Saturdays.