A Script for Failure
"Qualifying for a final is, in pretty much all parts of life, a massive achievement, until you lose it. And it's like all the rest never happened." - Jurgen Klopp
Yesterday after dinner I was watching an interview of Jurgen klopp which was being conducted to commemorate his 5 years at Liverpool and I guess 4 minutes into the interview he said the lines I quoted above.
Believe it or not, I was thinking this exact same thing for the past few days. No, not this exact same football analogy or getting to final. No. But the sentiment, I was resonating this very same same sentiment. That no matter what you do, once you fail, everything you have achieved up until that point gets nullified from people's minds.
The pages of history book will still say you have achieved the most prestigious awards throughout your school years, made everyone around you proud. But one mistake is all it takes to invalidate all those efforts piled up over the years in the hearts of the people closest to you, the ones that matter the most.
And this isn't coming out of nowhere. There's no hiding from the fact that I have made mistakes. But that has also lead me to the epiphany that no matter how hard we try, we will fuck up at some point or the other. Humans are destined to screw up.
I have always played the nice guy. All my life I can remember trying to please everyone. By everyone I mean parents and close family, make them proud. And boy I did! I did my "job" perfectly for nearly 20-22 odd years, until once I didn't. And I watched everything just crash around me, all I had built. Like a card house.
My fault, I let them down a bit too late :)
I am proud that I have a lot of people on this blockchain space who care about me deeply. Okay, maybe not a "lot" in terms of number, but in terms magnitude, they're more than a lot and before any of you worry what went wrong, it's nothing that happened recently. I just had the realization recently, that's all :)
Despite everything, I put on a facade and tried acting like it's all fine. But it wasn't, it really wasn't and I was tired of "faking niceness" constantly. The effort needed was exhausting to say the least.
You just can not please everyone, no matter how nice you play. At some point, we will slip up and if one slip up is enough to wipe off all the efforts of the past, the question has to be asked. Is all the effort really worth it?
I can not tell you what's a successful recipe for happiness and peace, I haven't reached there. But I can assure you, attempting to please everyone and playing nice is a tried and tested Script for Failure.
"It's a good thing to learn. Giving your absolute everything doesn't guarantee you get anything." -Jurgen Klopp
https://twitter.com/simplifylife_11/status/1318174697515753477
Doc, yes you can't please everyone all the time. Its impossible. Yes, the effort will exhaust you as well.
And yes, you will eventually break and the iteration will blow up, like a Mandlebrot Set. (but you can always stay inside the stability field, and you will be okay, and get something marvelous as well, called "Life").
I have had very similar experiences in my life. But there is a significant difference; I came from the other direction. Meaning, at your age and younger, I didn't care at all. I will just behave whatever way I please at that point in time. I was a complete random disaster. As I grow older, I learned that doesn't work. So I tried slowly to become nice to people, and yes, there is a certain amount of acting involved.
Then someone close to me said; "look, you can't act, and you are being terrible at it too, so why don't you try and like it?" At first, I was skeptical, how come I 'like' something that I 'hate'? That is absurd! But slowly, I tried it. I tried to find one good thing in something I dislike. And slowly, over many years, and lots of grey hairs later, now I am better at it. I try and find light within my darkness. That helps.
I have learned that it is all true. Beta, Oronyodev, Captain Spark.... they are all true :)
What I think is, it doesn't hurt to be nice to someone. But dada, what I don't like is that a lot of people around us takes "being nice" to be going above and beyond and do something that creates unnecessary burden on the person doing it.
Yes sure, it doesn't cost anything to show kindness. But a balance needs to be reached. I don't see the point why someone should exhaust themselves trying to show "too much" kindness (if that's even a thing).
Dada, two things here. I don't see it to be wrong if you are acting the way you want as long as you maintained the respect for people around you. For example, I like listening to heavy metal music on full volume. And doing that is going to cause disturbance to people in the house and neighbors. And if I go on and play the music anyways, then yes that is wrong.
This brings me to the second point, in this specific scenario, being nice would be to put my headphones on listen to whatever music I want. This is showing compassion to people around us and this should be the definition of being nice. This is Making the "correct" judgement call.
We could go on with such examples and I'm sure you will have much better examples than I can come up with, but what I'm trying to say is dada, we gotta find the balance.
Not playing nice doesn't mean we have to be a douche ;) We can still be a nice guy without playing the nice guy role!