Day 1616
I recently finished the section of The Four Agreements where Don Miguel Ruiz makes his second agreement: Don’t take anything personally.
It sounds simple enough. Then someone says exactly the wrong thing to you and all of a sudden you are flooded with emotions.
A few nights ago, my wife and I were out together when she asked me about career progression. It was a reasonable question. More importantly, it came from someone who loves me, wants the best for me, and wants our family to thrive.
And I got defensive.
I started explaining. Justifying. Constructing hypotheticals. Would you rather I make twice as much money but hate my job? Would it really be better if I spent less time with the family? What about all the benefits of having work I actually enjoy? None of those questions were entirely illegitimate, but they were not really answers to what she had asked.
I was defending myself against an accusation she had never actually made. That realization helped me understand what Ruiz means when he tells the reader, “Don’t take anything personally.”
Taking something personally requires an intermediate step that happens so quickly we barely notice it. Someone says something. Then we translate their words into a judgment about ourselves.
She asks about my career. I hear: You are not successful enough.
Someone offers criticism. I hear: You are inadequate.
Someone disagrees with me. I hear: You are stupid.
Someone does not invite me somewhere. I hear: They do not like me.
The event happens outside of us. The verdict is often produced inside of us, and once the verdict appears, we start fighting it.
The interesting thing about that conversation with my wife was that, after reflecting on it, I realized she had touched something that already existed inside me.
Some of my friends make more money than I do. At least I think they do. In some cases I know roughly what they earn. In others I am probably filling in the blanks myself.
That ties in nicely with the next chapter I’ll likely read tomorrow because the next agreement in Ruiz’s book is Don’t make assumptions. These two ideas fit together almost perfectly.
I can look at somebody else’s career and construct an entire imaginary life around it. He earns more than I do. Therefore he must be doing better than I am. Therefore he must feel more successful. Therefore his family must have fewer problems. Therefore maybe I am behind. But I do not actually know that. I do not know the private tradeoffs another person has made. I do not know how much they enjoy waking up in the morning. I do not know their debts, anxieties, relationships, ambitions, regrets, or private conversations with themselves. I barely even know their salaries.
Yet the human mind is remarkably talented at taking a few visible facts and constructing an invisible world around them. Then we compare our real lives, with all their complexity, against a fictional version of somebody else’s.
That seems like a terrible way to measure a life.
When I strip those comparisons away and ask myself what I actually think about my career, I feel quite differently. I work in an industry I deeply care about. I like the people I work with. I respect my boss. I have flexibility. I work remotely. I can eat lunch with my children. If I need five minutes away from the screen, I can walk into another room and see them. I can travel with a laptop and continue doing my job from somewhere else.
Those things have enormous value. Would I like to earn more money? Absolutely. Supporting a family is expensive. More income would create more breathing room. That is a legitimate problem to work on. But there is a profound difference between saying I could increase my income and saying I am inadequate because my income is not higher.
One is information. The other is identity. One invites action. The other invites shame. Learning to make that distinction for yourself might be one of the most practical applications of not taking things personally.
We should be able to hear criticism without allowing it to become a verdict on who we are. Maybe somebody sees something I do not. Maybe my wife is right that I should think more deliberately about the next stage of my career. Maybe a friend notices a weakness in me. Maybe my boss gives me feedback I need to hear.
“Don’t take anything personally” should not become an excuse to ignore reality. If ten people independently tell me I am behaving like a jerk, perhaps the highest-IQ response is not to declare that everybody else is projecting. The better approach is to separate the signal from the judgment. Is there useful information here? If so, take it. Does this comment define my worth? No. Those two thoughts can exist at the same time.
That becomes especially important when something hits a nerve because in those moments, when emotions start flooding our bodies, it is easy to let logic fly out the window. I have noticed this tendency in myself far beyond conversations.
Sometimes I rush. I rush when I am speaking. I rush when I feel pressure. I rush when I want something to go well. I even tend to rush while playing golf. But last weekend, I noticed something during a round of golf with my mates. On the shots where I slowed down, breathed through my nose, looked at the shot I wanted to hit, visualized hitting it, settled my posture, and then swung, I played better.
I was not standing over the ball for thirty seconds filling my head with fifteen swing thoughts. I was simply deliberate.
There is a difference.
Rushing is often an attempt to escape discomfort. Deliberateness means staying present long enough to respond properly. The same thing happens when somebody says something that stings. You feel it before you have even fully processed the sentence. A little surge in the chest. Tension in the shoulders. Heat in the face. The mind starts assembling its rebuttal. That is the moment when we should try to do the opposite.
Breathe. Slow down. Ask what was actually said. Ask what story we are attaching to it. Ask why this particular sentence had so much power over us.
Sometimes the comments that bother us most are valuable precisely because they reveal where we are least secure. If somebody told me I was terrible at astrophysics, I doubt I would lose much sleep over it. I have never claimed to be an astrophysicist. But touch an area where I already question myself and suddenly the words have electricity.
That is useful information. The person speaking may be wrong about me, but my reaction can still teach me something about myself. And Ruiz’s idea becomes even more interesting when you realize it applies not only to criticism, but also to praise.
That might actually be the harder one to wrestle with, honestly. Most of us understand why we should avoid being destroyed by somebody else’s insults. We are less suspicious of compliments. Someone praises our work and we feel amazing. A post gets thousands of likes and suddenly we are brilliant. People tell us we are funny, insightful, attractive, talented, successful, or courageous, and naturally we enjoy it. There is nothing wrong with enjoying praise. The danger comes when we need it.
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Because if somebody else’s approval has the power to construct your identity, their disapproval necessarily has the power to damage it. If praise can make you, criticism can unmake you. You can see this play out online constantly. Someone builds an audience because people love what they say. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, they begin saying what the audience loves. Their feedback loop becomes their compass. The crowd applauds, so they move in that direction. The crowd gets angry, so they retreat. Soon the person who built the audience has become captive to it. We call this audience capture, but it is really an extreme form of outsourcing your internal state.
The same crowd that makes you feel like a king on Monday can make you feel like a monster on Friday. People get canceled online and sometimes experience it as though reality itself is collapsing around them. I do not say that dismissively. Words hurt. Public humiliation hurts. Being misunderstood hurts. Thousands of people attacking you at once would be extraordinarily difficult to experience.
But that is precisely why an internal center of gravity matters.
If the crowd does not possess the authority to determine your worth when it loves you, it should not possess that authority when it hates you either. That does not mean we should become numb or go meditate in the Himalayas until we achieve some Zen state. It just means becoming sovereign over what enters you.
Ruiz uses striking language around words. He describes them as a form of magic and talks about the poison people can transmit through them. I understand why. Words can change the chemistry of your entire day. A sentence can live inside your head for twenty years. Somebody casually says something when you are ten years old and decades later part of you is still arguing with them.
That really makes me reflect on what it means to be a father. My children do not yet possess the perspective I am trying to develop as an adult. If I am frustrated after a difficult day, they are probably not thinking:
Dad has a lot going on internally right now, and his current emotional state should not be interpreted as a judgment of my inherent worth.
They are children. They take things personally. And that means I have a responsibility to be unusually careful with my words. The things parents say can become part of the internal narrator their children carry into adulthood.
I want to teach my children eventually that other people’s judgments do not define them. But while they are young, I also need to remember that they may not yet know how to separate my emotions from their identity. That makes the first two agreements beautifully interconnected.
Be impeccable with your word.
Do not take anything personally.
The first asks us to be careful with what we send into the world.
The second asks us to be careful with what we allow the world to put inside us.
There is something symmetrical about that. Control what leaves you. Be discerning about what enters you.
I also cannot help viewing Ruiz’s description through my own Christian beliefs. I do not think Ruiz is making a Christian theological argument, and I would not pretend that his conception of “hell” is identical to the Christian understanding of a fallen world. But the metaphor resonates with me.
Human beings are extraordinarily capable of constructing hell for one another. Judgment. Envy. Pride. Resentment. Gossip. Fear. Anger. Shame. We can carry these things around for years and then hand them to somebody else with a few sentences. They hand some of theirs back. Soon everyone is poisoning everyone while wondering why the world feels poisonous.
Christianity tells a much larger story about sin, creation, redemption, and our relationship with God. But through that lens, I find Ruiz’s psychological insight useful. You can make your existence here much more hellish by allowing every judgment, insult, comparison, and insecurity to take root inside you. Or you can make it less hellish by learning to forgive, to love, and to stop treating every passing opinion as a final judgment.
I feel something similar when I think about ideas themselves. Sometimes an idea seems to arrive out of nowhere, as if an invisible lightning bolt just zapped an idea between my ears while I was not even paying attention.
I do not know what to call that.
Some people might call it intuition. Others might call it inspiration. The muse. The unconscious connecting dots beneath awareness. A field of information. God placing something on your heart. I am not interested in pretending I can prove which explanation is correct.
I simply know the experience because I have lived it. An idea appears in my mind that I was not consciously working toward one second earlier, and my instinct is immediately to say, I thought of this.
Maybe, maybe not.
But the older I get, the less interested I am in claiming absolute ownership over every good thing that passes through my mind. The idea arrived. I can be grateful for it. I can work on it. I can try to turn it into something useful. Maybe I can share it with a room full of people, have it resonate, and improve their lives. Maybe it only resonates with half of the people in that room. Knowing that is perfectly okay is another form of not taking things personally.
There is no need to take every criticism as proof that you are worthless, and do not take every compliment as proof that you are extraordinary. Do not even assume every brilliant thought proves how brilliant you are. Receive things. Examine them. Use what is useful. Let the rest pass.
Ayn Rand approached life from a very different philosophical framework than Ruiz, and certainly a different theological framework than Christianity. I would not collapse the three into one philosophy.
Still, one aspect of Objectivism has always resonated with me: the insistence that an individual must learn to think and judge independently rather than surrendering their mind to the collective.
That is close to what I find valuable here. Before trying to fix everybody around me, I can examine the judgments operating inside myself. Before demanding that the world stop criticizing me, I can become less dependent on its approval. Before complaining that people are irrational, cruel, jealous, or judgmental, I can make sure I am not carrying those same tendencies into my own relationships.
There is tremendous freedom in that because it brings the problem back toward something I can influence. Learning to control what you can control, and letting go of the things you can’t.
I cannot control what somebody posts about me. I cannot control what my friends earn. I cannot control somebody else’s mood. I cannot control whether somebody misunderstands me. I cannot control whether people praise me. I cannot control whether they criticize me.
I can control whether I immediately react. I can breathe. I can ask questions. I can consider whether there is truth in what I heard. I can reject what is false. I can improve what needs improving. I can try to speak carefully in return. And perhaps most importantly, I can become aware of the voice inside me that takes all these external events and turns them into judgments about who I am.
That is the strange twist I did not fully understand when I first read the agreement. I thought “don’t take anything personally” was mostly about becoming resilient to other people.
Now I think it goes much deeper. Other people may supply the words, but very often, we supply their meaning. We are the ones who replay the sentence. We are the ones who compare ourselves against somebody else’s life. We are the ones who convert feedback into identity. We are the ones who turn an ordinary question from someone who loves us into an indictment that was never spoken. So yes, learn to stop taking other people’s words so personally.
But eventually you may discover that the person whose words you most need to stop taking personally is yourself.
8/24/26
Conor Jay Chepenik
