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Rule #67 Cultivate constructive apathy.
I want you to make the world a better place.
And I want you to be apathetic. Wait, what?
I know, it seems antithetical to the gospel I’m usually preaching, but I mean it. The thing is that I don’t want you to just stop caring about things. I want you to cultivate constructive apathy.
What’s constructive apathy? It’s the ability to not care about things that aren’t helping you on your journey.
What do I say when someone tells me I can’t achieve my goals?
How do I react when someone gives non-constructive criticism?
What goes through my head when people tell me to be realistic?
“I don’t care.”
This isn’t always easy; I know I struggle with it all the time. The truth is most of us want to be liked and understood. That’s part of what it means to be human. But not everyone is going to be supportive. Things won’t go right. There will be hundreds of reasons to give up.
And you have to not care.
You have to look at all of the reasons, unsupportive people, and non-constructive criticisms and say, “I don’t care.” Because you’ve got goals to crush.
Apathy can be powerful, but we have to make it work for us, not against us. Not caring about anything at all is self-nullifying, but caring too much about everything isn’t constructive either. We just have to let go of some things.
Sometimes you’ve just got to say “I don’t care,” and get back to work.
“Rules for Intrepid Living” is a weekly post about how we can live more adventurous lives.
That’s an interesting alternative to “resilience”. Perhaps a good idea as “resilience” is becoming another “bandwagon” word! Words eh …. complicated things 😉
I suppose I don’t necessarily dislike the notion of resilience… It just, I don’t know, seems overused. It’s used to describe all manner of things that I don’t particularly consider resilient, but I suppose that could just be me arguing semantics. I’ll just need to cultivate a little more constructive apathy towards it, I suppose.