There was a light talk between me and one of my colleagues about trade-offs in software architecture (only touched its surface and not deep at all, lol) but that’s not the topic I’m going to talk about. Long story short, I was thinking the existence of “trade-off” in a wider scope. Do we realize that trade-offs are present in everything we do? Let’s take an interesting example, the most common and the thing that most people complain about is making everyone happy. Without any doubt, I count myself in 😆
Why in the world am I going to make everyone happy? What thought crosses my mind? Let’s assume I’m able to make everyone happy, but do I include myself into what I call ‘everyone’? If not, it’s not making everyone happy, it’s more like ‘I don’t deserve happiness for what I’ve done and will do’ instead. Frankly speaking, the fact is I don’t include myself into ‘everyone’ and I believe some of you who unconsciously being people pleaser with lack of self-care will be on the same page. This kind of situation leaves me in miserable feeling of myself. Starting from anxiously being kind to anyone to being fed up with everyone. In case I’m eager to make people happy, I have to accept the reality that I can never make everyone happy. When I make everyone happy, there’s a chance I can’t force myself to be happy as well. But when I make everyone disappointed, I gain more and more pressure since their disappointment is caused by me. And I start to think that everyone always piss me off but I know that’s not fair, just because only certain people annoy me, I find everyone annoying. The reason is when we feel upset, angry, disappointed or other negative emotions, it’s quite hard to think clearly and being wiser. I hope we all can learn from that, be more patient and can overcome those bad emotions 🙂
What’s wrong with being people pleaser?
I’m pretty sure that question crosses our mind now. I want to emphasize that being a person who please another person is really awesome! and in my religion, Islam really has big concern about humanity and we’re taught to do good deeds. Hence, there’s nothing wrong with pleasing people. What can make it wrong is trying so hard to please people with lack of self-care and when some of them are unhappy, you feel like you’re the one a place to blame and you don’t care about yourself at all. You don’t have any boundary about what’s important for you, what’s important for them and what’s important for them and you. Therefore, you’re lack of prioritizing something that you should make it number one. For example, you’re already busy with your activity and there’s someone who ask for your help (with no urgency) but you priotize helping him/her to make him/her happy while you’re not. When you think they should be happy because of your help, they unconsciously put expectation on you. If their expectation is not achieved, you can see they’re not really happy of your work by seeing their face. Finally, you end up thinking you’re the most pitiful person on earth. Overall, it’s not good to be a people pleaser that way, unless you have the ability to duplicate yourself like a ninja in the movie.
Anyway, that’s what it’s called ‘trade-off’.
There are only two possibilities that we should be aware of:
- Everyone is happy but we aren’t
- Vice versa
That’s pretty much it 😁
Key takeaway from this rantings:
- Trying to make everyone happy is impossible and just a waste of time
- If everyone isn’t happy, at least there will always be the ones who are in our shoes. No matter how many of them. I believe even if a jerk has his own people who are always there for him.
Some say life is about choice. Yep, couldn’t agree more! But don’t forget about trade-off 😉