Michael Gervais

It's not a reflection of you.

It's that you're contributing to something in a meaningful way.

And all of the greats, all of the historical greats, and I'm not talking about the high performers in the NBA or NFL, I'm talking about the real changers across the planet that have made a difference.

most of them are purpose-based, that they are fundamentally committed to a purpose larger than them.

Think about Mother Teresa, Mandela, Gandhi, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Dr. King.

Keep going down the list and you'll say, hmm, I see the common thread there.

Cornell professor Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues, they devised a social experiment, and this was back in early 2000s.

And it was to see whether people are really observing and judging us at every turn.

And so what he did is he gathered 100 college students and he entered them and just kind of put them in a room.

And then he had...

a handful of folks that he gave in a separate room, these really ugly t-shirts.

And it was a photo of the pop singer Barry Manilow that was on the front of it.

And the students that were wearing that Barry Manilow shirt were like, oh God, you want me to walk in there with this?

And yes.

And then they just went through a series of experimental questions saying, how many people do you think in the room of your friends, the room of a hundred people are going to notice?

And then they asked the people in the room, like, how many of you actually noticed what the shirt was that the person that walked in the room was?

Come to find out is that we overpredict how many people pay attention to what we're actually wearing and doing and thinking by the order of about 50%.

And so the takeaway that what he dubbed the spotlight effect is that we walk around and

thinking that they are looking at our hair, that they're looking at our clothing, that they're focusing on what we're doing and saying, when in return, they're actually focusing on their hair and their clothes and what they're about to say.

And so we are walking around with our own spotlight because we are, again, go back to almost the first point, is that our