Chapter 8: Differentially Value the Opinion of Others

The danger of seeking approval from others

It may be tempting to prioritize what others think of you above alternative options, such as what you believe is best. Like all forms of dishonesty, the full effects of prioritizing the opinion of others are far worse than they may seem.

The desire to be treated better than you would if you presented yourself to be as you really are is just one specific kind of greed. By fostering it, you are feeding it, and soon what seems like a manageable amount of the vice will spiral into less-manageable and more harmful forms. The gradient of greed includes lying, stealing, and even murdering.¹ While it’s obvious that pretense does not always advance past lying, know that this is the dangerous road you choose when you pretend to be more or better than you are.

Ironically, living so as to please others always leads to treating others worse than you would if you were honest about who you really are.² This should not be surprising. When you pretend to be different than you are, it’s never for those you are attempting to please. Deceit is always a selfish desire where you lie to get others to treat you better than they otherwise would. If you really care about other people, invest less effort in manipulating their opinion of you, and more effort in being who you really are around them.

The best way to care less about what others think is to become a coherent person. When you align your beliefs, desires, and actions, you will enjoy the constant assurance that you are on the right path and doing the right things for the right reasons, so far as you know, no matter what the rest of the world says or does or thinks.

Don’t pretend to be someone else to be liked by others

Deceit in self-representation runs rampant in the modern world. Self-representation seems to be a longstanding quality of human nature, but the modern inception of image filters, digital avatars, shapeshifting clothing, extreme cosmetics, and plastic surgery all combine to make it easier and more extensive than ever before.

In his own time, Paul recognized fakery towards others to be a problem. He wrote: “Let love be without dissimulation....” (Romans 12:9) Dissimulation means concealment of one’s thoughts, feelings, or character. Such pretense is everywhere today.

All too many people wear a mask, exerting extreme effort to hide who they really are. How they present themselves to others and even to themselves does not match who they know they really are. They wear different masks for different occasions, all with the intent of obtaining greater favor than they would with their true identity.

People pretend to be different than they are to enjoy benefits beyond what they deserve. Will it make you feel any better about yourself to get credit for being someone you aren’t? An unfortunate consequence of fakery is that one’s entitlement becomes based on the illusion they project, rather than their actual worth. Inflated entitlement causes you to reject options that are actually the best available to you and prevents you from enjoying gratitude in the things you actually deserve.

Too many think that they can somehow find a shortcut to what they say they desire through anything but the truth, but these benefits don’t last. Realize that whatever you have through deception is as much of an illusion as the deception that enabled you to obtain it. Whatever limited benefit comes through pretending to be better than you are will be overcome by reality sooner or later, and will always carry a greater permanent price than anything it paid in the short term. The truth always manages to be revealed. Any arrangement in your life based on anything but who you really are will only endure as long as you manage to avoid the portions of reality that would overwhelm the illusion. Benefits that come to you through fakery can only be maintained as long as the deception endures.

The benefits of a forged facade aren’t worth as much as they are thought to be, even while they endure. Whatever benefit you receive from wearing a mask will be as shallow as your pretended personality.

Your lies make it easier for others to see who you really are

Dishonest people are constantly trying to hide. They hide from themselves. They hide from others. They hide from life. And yet, everything they do to hide actually makes what they are trying to hide more obvious to everyone else.

The more a person tries to hide from themselves, the more they will need to do to continue hiding from themselves. Their increasingly obvious efforts and inevitable mistakes make it that much easier for everyone to see. As you lie more and more, you further expose your deepest, darkest secrets, which you mistakenly believe are hidden only because you’ve managed to hide them from yourself. Like a silly toddler who thinks he is hiding from everyone by covering his eyes, you are only fooling those who are as dishonest—and therefore as blind—as you are.

Just as you can’t do good secretly without public consequences,³ you can’t do evil secretly without public consequences. These consequences will cascade until all things are known by all. The more someone lies, the more easily others can see who they really are.

Honest people hope that others see more of who they really are. They want to see everything about themselves—especially the dark parts—so they can come to God and have him teach them how to be better.⁴ Dishonest people hope others don’t see them for who they really are because they don’t want to see themselves as they really are.⁵ How differently would you act if everything you did, and every reason for which you do it, were plainly known to everyone? If you would act any differently than you do for any reason other than to account for the limits in understanding and intelligence of other people, you are a dishonest person.

No one lies to help others

Some people claim to lie in order to help another person feel better, but this is misguided. You can’t lie without harming yourself, whoever you are lying to, and everyone else. When you lie, you make the world a worse place than it would otherwise be. A lie that makes someone feel better does so only temporarily, and only by postponing or denying the truth. Postponing consequences only compounds the intensity of those consequences when they finally come. Any apparent short-term good offered by a lie will absolutely be overtaken by the long-term evil that always accompanies it. A truly empathetic person would never choose to boost a person’s present feelings at the cost of their future situation. A person truly concerned with the benefit of another person would necessarily have to calculate that benefit in the scope of the long-term. The net harm of any lie is always greater than any net benefit. False empathy, false charity, flattery, and all other forms of lies that seem to be for the benefit of another are actually just for the benefit of the person telling them.

Lies in the name of false empathy go far beyond saying false things to make others feel good in the moment. They entail any thought, feeling, or action that purports to be for the benefit of another while actually being for the benefit of self. One way to detect false empathy is to pay attention to how effectively the thought, feeling, or act actually addresses what is needed or wanted. For example, everyone knows someone who loves giving gifts, yet who can’t seem to buy anything desired by or useful to the recipient, and won’t stop even when asked to. In such a case, it is abundantly obvious to everyone except the gift-giver that their giving is actually about how it makes them feel, rather than actually serving the person receiving the gift. The selfish gift-giver is just one specific example of a more general peddler of false empathy: the love-bomber.

Love-bombers are those who go above and beyond any normal limits of praise, service, or giving, but only do so in order to indebt you to reciprocate when and how they insist. To see a love-bomber’s true character, analyze how they treat those who can’t or won’t do anything for them. This is how they will inevitably treat you when you fail to meet their unattainable requirements for on-demand reciprocation. A truly selfless person will always act with the motive of benefiting others, even when dealing with those who can’t benefit them and even with their enemies.⁶

Don’t treat people and things based on anything other than how they really are

The scriptures consistently instruct us to treat others with equal application of consequences.⁷ The scriptural phrase for this—being “without respect of persons”—means to be impartial. Partiality is when you base your view or treatment of someone or something on anything other than its objective merit.⁸ Partiality is possible with people, but also with things and ideas. Partiality is treating anything differently than it deserves, based on dispassionately applied uniform and objective standards.

All of the following are examples of partiality:

• When you treat others based on how they make you feel, rather than how they really are.
• When you ignore evidence that conflicts with your preconceived feelings about someone or something.
• When you resist an argument for reasons other than the pertinent facts.
• When you make a choice based on its ease rather than what is most beneficial.
• When you make choices based on fear instead of logical expectation of cost and benefit.

Impartiality prioritizes facts over feelings, while partiality often prefers feelings to facts. Partiality is dishonest because you are being inconsistent in your behavior between similar situations. Remember: honesty requires you to reconcile to reality, which includes acting consistently across examples of similar situations.

We should be on guard to ensure that we are treating other people and things according to their merit and without prejudice or bias. As we emulate God’s impartiality,⁹ we will incur his favor. As we deviate from God’s impartiality, we will incur his wrath.¹⁰

You can’t please everyone

It’s not unusual for a person to seek to be liked by all. Everyone has different expectations, and it is impossible to please everyone. To please one person tends to require offending some other person. Differing desires make mutually exclusive expectations increasingly likely across larger groups.

Some try to skirt this impossible puzzle by pretending to believe what they do not, morphing their actions and words to fit the expectations of whoever is observing them. Faking who you are to gain false approval from others carries a multitude of penalties that guarantee a long-term cost higher than any short-term benefit. Whatever penalties come for living sincerely are always worth the cost.

Faced with the reality that you can’t please everyone, you will have to choose who to please. How do you choose whose opinion you should care the most about?

You should care more about what God thinks than any person

Jesus had many bad things to say about those who made choices based upon public opinion rather than their conscience. For example, he said:

46 Beware of the scribes, which desire to walk in long robes, and love greetings in the markets, and the highest seats in the synagogues, and the chief rooms at feasts;
47 Which devour widows’ houses, and for a shew make long prayers: the same shall receive greater damnation. (Luke 20)

The Lord’s opinion matters more than any man’s. To prefer any person’s opinion over God’s is to guarantee outcomes less than what you could otherwise enjoy.¹¹

Being honest will likely require you to see and believe differently than almost everyone else. You can’t live according to how everyone else thinks of you without living insincerely. You can’t live insincerely without living in opposition to your soul, and no worldly gain is worth losing your soul.

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? (Matthew 16:26)

Because most people are so different from God, you should expect that they will like you less the more like God you become.¹² Maximizing God's opinion of you will require you to offend many, since he sees things very differently than human nature does.¹³ The more you serve God, the more different you will be than others:

13 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.
14 Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.
15 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. (Matthew 5)

You have to get to the point where you care more about what God thinks of you than what others do.¹⁴ You can’t care what God thinks and care what others think at the same time:

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew 6:24)

Always live up to your sincere understanding of what God would do in your place, not what others expect of you. Follow what you sincerely believe, even when it puts you at odds with other people. Sin is determined by what you believe, not what others believe. Sin is less than what you know is your best (see James 4:17), not less than what others think is best for you. Often, you will disagree with others on what is best.

Instead of trying to be liked by those who you don’t want to resemble, expect to be hated by them. While the common response is to act so as to avoid conflict with such people, you should instead use their offense as a barometer to measure your own worth. If your beliefs, feelings, and actions aren’t offensive to those whose beliefs, feelings, and actions you feel are worse than yours, you should question whether you are living authentically.

Not all opinions are equally accurate

The mistake we make in our perceptions of others’ opinions about us is that we make no distinction between them. People have vastly differing amounts of wisdom and experience, and any approach that treats their opinions as equally valuable is sure to be ill-fitting to either the foolish or the wise.¹⁵ The approval of another person is only as valuable as the value of that person. As long as you are tethered to the approval of another, you will never grow beyond their limits. While you remain tethered to the opinion of all people, you also tether yourself to the caliber of thoughts, feelings, and actions found in the average person. Normal people are, by definition, mediocre. If you seek for the approval of those who are above-average, you will have to be better than mediocre. Being better than average is not a passive outcome.

Effort is required to exceed the average, and succeeding ensures you will endure opposition from those who choose not to do the same. How well can you carry the rejection of most people, many of whom will misunderstand your actions, question your motives, undervalue your sacrifice, and envy your success? How different are you willing to be?

It is possible for others to see you more accurately than you see yourself

You would be utterly astonished to see how often and to what extent the qualities of our character are manifested in our lives. While these manifestations are almost totally hidden from almost everyone, those with sufficient understanding can see them as plainly as you can someone’s hair color or height. Your emissions of character might be invisible to you, but they can be as significant, obvious, and constant to an observer as the background noise of a kitchen appliance is to someone paying attention to, even if it remains unnoticeable to anyone else.

Character traits are so deeply rooted that they tend to emit clues in even the smallest of actions. Little outward actions can provide strong demonstrations of large internal attributes.¹⁶ A wise observer can learn a great deal about someone’s core values and deep desires through the smallest or seemingly mundane actions.¹⁷

It comes as a surprise to many that there are people in the world so wise that they will quickly come to know you better than you know yourself. This familiarity is not limited to the experiences you have had, but will extend into accurate projections of how you would act in situations beyond your present experience, each of which demonstrates who you are beyond what you can see without them.

Have you ever wondered how it was that, during his mortal ministry, Jesus could know such private things about a person just by meeting them?¹⁸ Though he obviously had supernatural vision, the Lord leaned on the outward signs of inward character.

When he called his apostles, he did not call men with whom he grew up in Nazareth, but from new acquaintances in other towns. What clues did he use? Everything! Their reactions to his actions,¹⁹ their independent choices (such as their vocations), and everything else they did and didn’t do or say provided evidence for their character, all of which he processed over time, including a long night in prayer before he called them.²⁰ It was no coincidence that several of the apostles had chosen the vocation of fishing—that much closer to becoming eventual fishers of men—or that Levi’s profession as a tax collector was assessing the value of things, which aided him in recognizing the value of the Lord when he was unrecognized by so many. Such signs are evident in the lives of all people for those with eyes to see them.

Similarly, those who successfully identified Jesus as the Christ did so through using the same subtle clues that he used to identify and choose the most righteous men as his disciples. After the Lord’s resurrection, he walked incognito with two disciples. While they failed to recognize him as he unfolded the scriptures during the long walk, it was the subtle signs in his blessing of bread they shared at the end of their journey that opened their eyes to who he was (see Luke 24). John the Baptist recognized the sign of the dove as the promised indication of the Messiah, and in response to John’s later inquiry, Jesus cited several particular expressions of his character as the evidence he was looking for.²¹

The better you know yourself, the less likely it is that you will come across someone who knows you better. Unfortunately, very few people know themselves very well at all. While you can learn to see how you really are incrementally through the choices you make and their repercussions, other people can sometimes provide an expedited channel.

Subtle clues were used in scripture by others who sought to measure the character of others. For example, Rachel was identified by Abraham’s servant as a woman worthy of being Isaac’s wife through her willingness to perform the considerable labor to pull water up from the well for a stranger and his many thirsty camels (see Genesis 24).

Though not all people have enough understanding to discern them fully, to one who is aligned with the spirit of God, your secret works and motives²² may as well be a neon sign mounted on your face.

Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right. (Proverbs 20:11)

If people understood just how much of themselves they reveal to a person of understanding with every word they utter or omit, and everything they do or don’t do, they would probably avoid such a person at any cost.

Other people can help you see beyond the limits of self-imposed blindness

The more you engage in dishonesty, the more numb you become to the ever-increasing damage you cause in yourself and others. Just as someone else is usually the first to tip you off to the presence of a skinnumbing biting mosquito, you may need the observations of an objective third party who cares more about you than you do to point out unnoticed harm. Once you have lost the ability to feel guilt while lying, the habit can only be broken through extensive, deliberate effort, typically requiring a patient, determined, and very kind friend who is willing to help you notice when you are dishonest. These people are rare in the population, but even rarer in the friend circles of established liars, from which they are summarily extirpated as part of the liars’ attempt to avoid guilt by preserving their bubble of delusion. As a result, the jolt of truth usually comes from an outsider during a chance encounter.²³

An illustration of the full cycle—from neglectful lack of intention to willful lies, to continuously lying without conscious choice, to being suddenly confronted with jarring truth from a stranger—is given in the story of Korihor, whose example was discussed earlier to illustrate several other aspects of lying. Korihor gained a following by repeating ideas that were popular, but which he knew were false. After experiencing the eventual consequences of his repeated lies, Korihor admitted that he had known he was lying all along, but was seduced into believing them the more he repeated them.²⁴ Korihor’s repetition of lies didn’t just reduce his ability to see the truth, they transformed him so extensively that any relief of the negative consequences he incurred would result in him immediately resuming his previous behavior.²⁵

Others could have much more experience than you

In order to know yourself deeply, you must experience more of the breadth of human experience. It’s not uncommon for people to assume that they would act in more difficult situations as they have in easy situations. That is almost never the case. You can’t know yourself very well until you see your reaction to great sorrow and great joy, great poverty and great wealth, great pleasure and great pain, great busyness and great leisure, and so on.

There are among us human beings whose experiences have more fully extended across the available breadth. If they have sufficient wisdom, they may be able to apply their experience to your character qualities and help you see yourself beyond the limits of your own experience.

There are vast differences among people, and you’ll need to exercise judgment in identifying the few who possess the wisdom to help you. Though much could be said on this topic, a short list of tips can be helpful:

• Those who have solved the problems at least as difficult as those you face are preferable to those who have not.
• Problems solved are more important than credentials earned.
• Those who have achieved what you seek to achieve are preferable to those who have not.
• Those who can give you solutions are better than those who can merely give you a place to talk about your problem.
• Those who are willing to help you for free tend to be more sincere than those who want something in return.
• Of those who charge money, those whose earnings come from your success are more likely to provide greater value than those who bill by the hour they spend with you.
• Those who give more than they receive are preferable to those who take more than they give.

Others can sometimes help you discover your potential

All potential has a path to being fulfilled. Sometimes the path is known and the person is already capable of taking the next step on it. Often, however, the person lacks the strength or motivation to take the next step, and sometimes the next step is not known. Too often, potential goes unfulfilled because a person is too prideful to accept that they do not have all the answers and are not capable of solving every problem alone. Too often, potential goes unfulfilled because a person is terminally trapped at the limits of their present knowledge. In cases including these, the assistance of another can be helpful.

Reality is successive and progressive. Your knowledge of yourself, others, and the world grows line upon line. It is always the case that there is someone else out there that knows what still lies beyond your own understanding. No matter where you are on your path, there is someone, somewhere, that knows the next steps better than you, has already taken them, and who can help you by identifying options you haven’t considered, provide you with better reasons and stronger evidence for and against the options you face, and help you take the next step.²⁶

Others can help you see and overcome what overcomes you

Sudden problems are hardly ever sudden at all, but the first visible symptom of a deeper, long-standing fault in yourself that would probably be much more visible to an outsider. Much like a plantar wart, if you fail to do the more painful work of digging out the root of the problem, you are just going to face even greater pain later. It is not uncommon to require the assistance of a mentor to help you see and totally address the lack of understanding that caused an unexpected consequence. Challenges beyond your ability can show you who you are and help you become better, but you’ll probably still need the help of another person to see and address them. Seek out someone who saw it coming to help you better prepare for the future. Look for those who have what you want, and openly investigate whether the new beliefs or actions that worked for them will work for you.

When you find yourself with problems you can’t solve, needs that you can’t meet, questions you can’t answer, and desires that remain unfulfilled, be open to new ideas, actions, and people that are different from what you’ve already tried.²⁷

Caring what others think will constrain your thinking

When you care more about what others think about you than the truth, you will subconsciously block out thoughts that you know will cause others to look on you poorly. You will never even get to the point where you can rationally consider these ideas or the actions that align with them. The ideas and actions you fail to consider may well be the solutions to the problems that beset you and the answers to the questions that beguile you.

You need to realize that preferring the reactions of others over fidelity to your own beliefs and desires is one and the same as believing that those you are trying to impress have a greater effect on your outcomes than the rest of reality. Inasmuch as you sincerely and accurately model the laws of cause and effect that govern the world, you build a set of rules predicting what will happen under certain conditions. To set these aside in preference for the approval of others is to adopt the belief that the person or people in question have a greater influence on the universe as it pertains to you than anyone or anything else, which is patently absurd.

To the extent that you care about what all other people think, you will find yourself reacting poorly in the presence of those few whose opinions matter more. These people have thoughts, feelings, and actions that provide an increment of improvement over your own, but to the extent that you are concerned with pleasing everyone, what they offer will offend many of those you are trying to please.

Don’t blindly accept anyone’s opinion of you

In spite of the powerful potential of the opinions of others, don’t ever blindly follow anything that anyone says. Truth never stands alone; it always leaves abundant clues. Nothing should ever be accepted as true without evidence commensurate to the scope of the truth. Just as stranger ideas require greater evidence, ideas that purport to have greater worth also require greater evidence. How you really are is of the utmost importance, and someone’s unsubstantiated guess is worth very little weight.

The opinion of others is only as valid as the strength of their reasons for holding it. Evidence can come in many forms, from prior demonstrations of wisdom in the person sharing their opinion, to specific examples of your past behavior that align with the claims. When a person presents insufficient evidence, you should doubt what they say. If a perspective presents stronger evidence than an alternative, honesty obligates you to accept it. When you do, realize that you are not just blindly accepting another person’s opinion. If someone can persuade you to think, act, or feel as they do, then by all means do so— but you will do it because you believe it to be best, not because they expect you to.

Requiring sufficient evidence is also a key to preventing others from saying anything about you that hurts your feelings. If they fail to provide sufficient evidence of their opinion about you, the only reason you have to care about what they think is the damage they might do to those without the wisdom to discern between opinions that have sufficient evidence and those that do not.

Recognizing and boosting the opinion of the wise

While the perspective of wise or accomplished people can be invaluable in increasing the accuracy of your self-perception, the wise and accomplished are least likely to be identified or sought by those who most need their help. Wisdom in another is not frequently obvious to those who lack it in themselves. The best approach is to assume that a person knows of what they speak until they give you sufficient reason to doubt it. For most, this won’t take very long.

One indication that you are dealing with a wise person is that their words or presence make you feel less than you otherwise would. This offense is something most people recoil from, assuming it is due to the arrogance of the other person. However, the presence of real arrogance in another and its absence in you would make you feel better about yourself—not worse. If you find yourself feeling like less than you thought in the presence of another person, odds are that you are being temporarily relieved from an overinflated self-worth by the presence of someone better than you. Rather than make things worse by persisting in your pride, it is best to use such experiences to recalibrate your selfworth instead of persisting in your pride by assuming arrogance on their part.²⁸

The opinion of the unwise or ill-informed is inconsequential. Seek for and yield to the opinion of those wiser than you. If you have the opportunity to receive feedback from a wise person, resist the common tendency to diminish, deflect, or ignore what does not accord with your self perception.²⁹ Instead, open-mindedly hear them out and try to objectively weigh the evidence they provide you with. As you weigh what they say, realize that what you wish were true about yourself is irrelevant to establishing how you really are. At the same time, do not disregard real evidence from your life that demonstrates the kind of person you are. In considering evidence of your virtues, do not disregard your knowledge of your faults. Hold fast to what you know to be true until and unless someone gives you sufficient reasons to do otherwise.

Boost the opinion of those who have what you want or are how you want to be

The only opinions that should matter to you come from those who have what you lack and want, including their character. What is the value of the opinion of someone who doesn’t have anything you want? Why should you care about the opinion of anyone who is less than you want to be?

You can and should seek out people you respect and ask them what they think about you rather than passively awaiting them to proactively offer their unsolicited opinion. It isn’t difficult to find a person devoid of the politeness that prevents unsolicited opinions, but this trait is much more common among fools than the wise.³⁰ As a person becomes more wise, they will only be willing to share their unsolicited opinion to the extent they possess true benevolence. The possession of two rare traits is much more rare than the possession of either one alone.

Seek out those with whom you would trade lives if given the chance. Find those who have what you want, who know what you don’t, or who do what you are unable to. Ask them to give you advice, and carefully weigh what they say.

The advice of mentors will always be of varying degree of accuracy, so always remember your duty to vet all information and retain responsibility for your own reactions to whatever they say. Whether their advice is perfect or not, it will in almost every case be worth asking, as it will still provide you with options and ideas you hadn’t considered. Even bad advice has value, because the vetting process will help you enumerate reasons to have greater confidence in whatever you believe and do instead.

Prefer the voices that tell you that you can be better than you are over those who say you can’t

Some people have the unfortunate company of those who constantly discourage them from trying to improve themselves. When disparaging spouses, family members, or friends repeatedly signal that they do not believe you will ever be more than you presently are, it can be incredibly disheartening. You can find this message in surprising places, such as church, where most allegedly Christian teachers believe that you can never be more than you presently are, but if you can, it won’t be by very much. If you believe someone who tells you you’re hopelessly worthless, you will turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Significant improvement requires your whole heart and soul, and you will never pour those into anything that you believe to be impossible.

Conversely, if you believe someone who says you are capable of becoming better than you are, you will prove them right, too, for all of the opposite reasons. When you have credible reasons to believe that you are capable of more than you thought, you will try more than you would otherwise, and you will experience the benefits of doing so. This effect has been noted in many environments where a visionary, example-providing leader like Steve Jobs demanded outsized performance from others. In these situations, those involved always end up saying things like “when Steve was around, you felt like you could do anything, and you could.”

Always believe the voices that show you how you can be better, but never believe the voices that tell you that you can’t improve or don’t need to. Be the biggest optimist when it comes to potential, and an unrelenting critic when it comes to actuality.

You should care more about what those more like God think about you than any other person

What God thinks about you is much more important than what others think about you. If you perfectly perceived how he sees you, maximizing his pleasure would be the obviously optimal decision. Unfortunately, it is extremely unlikely that you know how God sees you, and while this book gives you powerful tools to improve your idea of how he sees you, it is possible that you are still in a position where someone else might see you more closely to how God does than you do.

What others think of you only matters to the extent they are more like God than you are. Note that this does not upgrade the value of someone’s opinion simply because they claim to be a Christian, nor does it preclude the opinion of a particular atheist being more correct than that of a particular Christian. Many who claim not to believe in God are more like him in at least some way than many who claim to believe in him. To follow the Lord is to be different and better—not just compared to those who know they hate God, but also compared to those who think they love him but don’t. To follow God requires you to turn away from most people who claim to be Christians and think, say, and do things that are far from God’s actual purpose and character.

If a person isn’t more like God than you, than their opinion should be assumed to indicate what to avoid rather than what to seek:

1 Then spake Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples,
2 Saying, The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat:
3 All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.
13 But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
15 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. (Matthew 23)

Seek out those who are most like God among those you know, and value their opinion of you above that of anyone else.

When you know what God thinks about you, you don’t care what others think about you

Much of how a person acts is based on their expectation of how others will view them. The desire to please others can lead us to improvement, but only up to the limit of what they see, the limit of what they are willing to say, and the limit of what they have already become. When you act to please God, not man, you gain strength to improve yourself fully—freed from the limits of others, and subject only to the limits of the good you are presently capable of seeing in him.

As you stretch to measure up to God’s idea of your potential, you will graduate beyond caring what those less like Jesus than you think about you.³¹