Have you ever said, “I don’t care what anyone thinks about me.”?
I know I have, and I also know it’s a lie.
The truth is we do care what other people think about us. Why wouldn’t we? How others view us can make or break us in this industry. It’s how we get jobs, score auditions, get agents, make friends, and create enemies.
What others think of us, like it or not, contributes to our brand, and ultimately, to our success. Think about the brands you interact with on a daily basis – Starbucks, Coke, Dell, Google, Twitter. What do these brands mean to you? Where would these brands be if they didn’t care what you thought?
When we say, “I don’t care what anyone thinks about me,” we really mean “I don’t care what some people think about me.” Or, “I don’t care what people think of me in this particular situation.”
If you’re Twitter, you probably don’t care what an 80-year-old woman who does not own a computer or have an email address thinks of you. But, what if Twitter didn’t care what anyone thought? Well, they probably wouldn’t be around very long. Of course, there are always going to be Twitter-haters, and maybe Twitter cares about what these people think and maybe they don’t. (We’ll get to haters in a minute.)
We almost always care about thoughts of the people who have a vested interest in our future. For most of us this will include:
Our spouse/partner
Our friends
Our parents/siblings/other family members
Our children
Our Directors/Producers (Bosses)
Our Agents
Our co-workers (the ones you respect, at least)
Our public/Audience
This isn’t to say that these people should approve of our every action. Or, that we should let these groups dictate who we are and what we do. That’s ludicrous. But, we tend to care what these people think about us because we respect them and their opinions of us (or, at the very least, we know they have some level of influence over us).
What about the haters?
It seems like there’s always someone who doesn’t like us, our craft, our ideas, our actions, whatever. This is a tough one because so often these haters can be convincing in their disdain for us. (some of us even have haters in the list above.) Here’s a question to ask to decide if you care: Do their values align with ours? If we stand for integrity and they don’t, then we may have a problem with each other. In some cases, we really shouldn’t care what these people think!
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