Understanding Your Place

Don’t you hate those people who think that the universe revolves around them? Well, stop hating them because they’re right….kinda. I’m being cheeky, of course, because what we really hate about those people is not that they think of themselves as being the center of the universe, which we all do to some extent, but that they expect us to think of them the same way, which we do not. And their consequential actions tend to be very disruptive to our own goals and objectives, especially those goals that rely on this person to act in a rational manner.

But as I said, in a manner of speaking those people are almost right in thinking that the world revolves around them, because while the world doesn’t revolve around them, their life certainly does, just as your life revolves around you. And I sometimes think, we get so annoyed with people who are self-centered, that we vow to never think of ourselves that way, and we swing the pendulum too far in the other direction.

Your life does revolve around you. You stand at the epicenter of everything that happens to you or affects you, and nothing that you would qualify as “your life” is irrespective of your influence on that thing. When you consider all the aspects of your life, you will find that every single one of them relies on your actions at some point. Even things that might seem out of your control, such as national laws or political trends, are still within your realm of influence, not only because you have some small measure of influence on them directly, but more so because you could always move to a different part of the world and remove that aspect of your life altogether. You are the one thing that every aspect of your life has in common - the pivot point around which all the things you care about revolves.

I’m harping on this point, not because of the importance of that point specifically, but because of the criticality of the corollary:

If you want to change something about your life, change something about yourself. The world will follow.