Worry Less About Where Your Choices Will Take You, And More About What Kind Of Person They’ll Make You
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By Heidi Priebe
Almost every decision we make is geared towards an end goal.
Getting that promotion. Embarking on that adventure. Securing that dream person or job or apartment.
Everything we do slants toward an outcome. Every decision is measured by its result.
But here is something we too often fail to keep in mind:
The outcome of our decisions is ultimately a lot less important than the motivation behind them.
One of my all-time favorite quotes by Wild author Cheryl Strayed is the simple phrase, “You can’t fake the core.”
Strayed suggests that no matter where we go in life, no matter what we do, no matter how far we run in any given direction, we can never put any real distance between the people we’re trying to be and the people we actually are.
Our true motivations will always be guiding us. Our core truths will always win out in the end.
Which is funny — because our core truths are often the very things we try to avoid when making decisions.
We want to make more money, so we compromise our passions.
We want to feel secure, so we stay stuck in a place that doesn’t grow us.
We’re afraid to take a leap of faith, so we ignore everything inside of us that’s urging us to venture out and explore.
We focus so intensely on the outcomes of our actions that we forget they are the least important part of the whole shebang.
At the end of the day, our happiness, our fulfillment and our pride will always be hinged upon the answers to three very simple questions:
Do we like ourselves? Can we live with ourselves? Are we proud of the choices we’ve made, even if they haven’t worked out as we hoped?
Because these are much more important questions to be asking ourselves than, “Am I impressive? Am I well-off? Do others envy me, even if I…
