I got the most insulting compliment on my outfit today. A woman told me that she liked how my shirt fit, that it was a better cut than most other shirts she had seen me wear.

The problem is, this shirt was really loose by my standards. I starved myself and worked out like a demon to become trim, and I wear almost exclusively tight athletic cuts. And I think I look great. But men work out to impress women more than they work out to impress themselves, and here was a woman telling me the baggy shit was better. Ouch.

I’m a colorblind engineer who grew up on a farm, so it’s certain that she understands fashion better than I do. Her comment just cut me to the bone because I realized how warped my perspective had been. I had put so much value on the approval of others, and I hadn’t even understood correctly what would earn that approval. Do you have any idea how much ground turkey and broccoli I had made myself eat? Ugh.

Jokes aside, this is a terrible error and I doubt I’m the only person who has made it. Any time we try too hard to change ourselves because of someone else’s opinions, we are wrong twice:

• Valuing someone else’s approval over our own satisfaction with our life
• Trying to guess what will actually earn someone’s approval (people are hard to read and change over time)

Clearly, I was the idiot for running until my body broke down, just because of a number on a scale. Clearly, it was a mistake to think that the right partner for me would care the most about how I looked in some tight jeans. And clearly, I’m an idiot and it shouldn’t have taken a compliment on a baggy shirt to learn these lessons. Clearly.

But here we are. And if nothing else I just want to be an example to others on what not to do.

• Are you forcing yourself to work on a goal you’re not passionate about, but you think is really important to someone else?
• Are you tired and frustrated and exhausted but you’re afraid that not doing it will make them reject you?
• Are you comfortable with who you are? Or are you deadset on getting approval and acceptance from someone else and then you think you’ll finally be happy?

If you answered “Yes” to one or more of the questions above then that’s a red flag. I’m not trying to tell you how to live your life, but these mistakes carried a terribly high price for me. You can’t get back the time you spend trying to earn other people’s approval. And there’s a lot of hard work you can do which means nothing to others if we misread their desires in the first place. We have to do things for ourselves, and counting on someone else to tell us we’re good enough is never the right answer.

Further Reading: If this post resonated with you then I think you’d get a lot out of “101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think” by Brianna Wiest. It’s jam-packed with lessons like this and dissections of why these behaviors don’t work – plus what to do instead. The essays are also very bite-sized, so it’s easy to read one each morning and have something to mull over throughout the day. I hope it helps you as much as it helped me.