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Most People Don't Care About You One Way Or The Other
June 14, 2008
Let’s face it. I live in Portland, Oregon. The people in Ontario, on the eastern side of the state, could give a rip about me. The people in
Des Moines battling the flood waters of the Des Moines River could care a fig about me here in Portland. Heck, close to home most of the people in my little neighborhood, don’t even know I exist.
The
corporatedojo writes
No one is looking for you. I am not so sure anyone is looking out for you either, in fact, I may so bold as to suggest, most people do not care about you. … Outside your small circle of friends, family and loved ones, most people are busy taking care of their own business, as it should be.
Corporatedojo makes an excellent point. We have furniture and accessories businesses. We want people to use our stores for their home décor needs. How do we get them to join our community that cares about us?
If it is true that most people don’t give a moments attention to you and me, then I asked another question that led me surfing around the net asking the new question Does God care for us? There are a lot of answers mostly about many who lose their faith when bad things happen. One answer goes like this:
Yes, He does care very much about all aspects of our lives.
There’s the rub. We believe we don’t have the energy to care about “all aspects of everyone’s lives”. And we don’t.
Walter Williams, writing in
Capitalism Magaziine, shared his thoughts on this subject with his professor and mentor Armen Alchian. Williams told Alchian that “my wife assumes that everybody is her friend until they prove differently. While such an assumption maximizes the number of friends that she will have, it also maximizes her chances of being betrayed. Unlike my wife, my assumption is everyone is my enemy until they prove they're a friend. That assumption minimizes my number of friends but minimizes the chances of betrayal.”
Professor Alchian suggested a third way:
The most reliable assumption, in terms of the conduct of one's life, is to assume that generally people don't care about you one way or another. It's a mistake to assume everyone is a friend or everyone is an enemy, or people are out to help you, or people are out to hurt you.
A major implication of this third way of looking at life is that your destiny, basically, is in your hands.
In other words, how you make it in this world, for the most part, depends more on what you do as opposed to whether people like or dislike you. In order to produce a successful life, you must find ways to please your fellow man. That is, you must discover what goods and services your fellow man values, and is willing to pay for, and then acquire the necessary skills and education to provide it. Whether your fellow man cares about you or not is largely irrelevant.
That takes us back to corporatedojo: One answer to the question was posed by the comedian Steve Martin “If no one is looking for you then you find them, you attract them, you bring them in and be so dam(n) good they can’t ignore you.”
Thoughts? Email me at
landfair3554@comcast.net
Posted by Mike Landfair on June 14, 2008 | Comments (2)
