I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. — Bill Cosby

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Author: Bill Cosby

Insight: Most of us spend our lives doing a strange math in our heads—trying to figure out the exact configuration of choices that will make everyone around us happy. We soften our real opinion in meetings so nobody's offended. We say yes to commitments we don't want because we can't bear disappointing someone. We pick a career path partly based on what we think others will approve of. The problem isn't that we care about people. It's that trying to please everyone forces you into an impossible logic: since different people want different things, the only way to satisfy all of them is to stand for nothing in particular. You become a mirror instead of a person. This doesn't actually make people like you more—it just makes you invisible and unreliable, because nobody can grab onto anything real. The twist is that people actually respect decisiveness more than agreeableness. When you clearly stand for something, choose your own path, and let some people disagree with you, something counterintuitive happens: you attract the people who genuinely connect with who you actually are. Failure usually comes not from making the wrong choice, but from trying to make every choice simultaneously.