Personas & Perception

Who Do Most People Know You As?

In its most literal interpretation, "most people" know you as a stranger. No matter what you have accomplished, most people on Earth know most other people as strangers. Take a moment to contemplate the countless individuals you'll see only once. I gave three tourists directions last night and it didn't cross my mind until now that I will almost certainly never see them again. This is true with most people. If it were your last time seeing someone, would you behave differently? Your first impression is often your last.

The ability to accept that you can simultaneously be cosmically insignificant yet significant on many other levels is important for sustaining a positive outlook. A motto that I have adopted is that the purpose of life is to help others through it. "Success" in Western cultures is more often preceded by career success as opposed to family, relationships, or happiness. If I were to die tomorrow, I would view my life as successful if my net influence on others was positive and if more people than fewer would say that having me in their lives made their lives better.

You may be different characters to different people: mother, father, brother, grandparent, boss, colleague, friend, acquaintance. You can be more than one thing to more than one person, but you cannot be everything to everyone. Sometimes we choose one role at the expense of another.

One aspect of exploring who you are to different people is realizing that to a stranger, you can be someone you have never been before. In unfamiliar places, you can reinvent yourself. This introduces the concept of being true to yourself and the importance of having a moral guidepost to determine when, to whom, and to what extent it is appropriate to adjust your character.

When you marry someone, you marry your perception of them and everything you know them to be. You marry that person as a husband or wife and as a friend. Though your spouse may also be a boss, you would unlikely want to marry that persona. You do not know every decision your spouse has made or will make, though you can mentally place your persona of them into a situation to sense how they would respond. Trusting that the decisions they make that you don't see are true to your perception contributes to a feeling of truly knowing them. Knowing who you are is inseparable from knowing what you are to someone else.