Be very weary of people who never have opinions or thoughts for you. Don’t be weary in the sense that they’re bad people, but understand that they probably don’t care about you too much. I go back to using children as an example. If you see your child, who you love so much, climbing a high place, you’ll probably scream at them to get down. The child may be upset at you for this but at least you weren’t indifferent. An indifferent person would let the child climb, fall, break his neck — then maybe, just maybe, call an ambulance.

I see it all the time in all aspects of my life. People are just too cool or too pre-occupied to care. They have no opinion, no feedback, no nothing.

The sad part about all of this is that most of us tend to seek to surround ourselves with indifferent people. I know I did at one point. “Man I love (so and so) cuz he don’t care about nothing.” Really? Is that a reason to love someone? The problem is that most of us don’t care for the truth. We’d rather seek a comfortable lie to live in and anyone who tries to take us out of it is seen as the enemy. The true enemy, however, is the person who won’t allow you or your career to be the greatest it can be.

Don’t believe me, look back at all the kids you knew growing up. Think of the ones who had no form of guidance and structure in their lives. The ones who ate whatever, drank whatever — stayed out till anytime of night. They were always classified as “cool”. We always envied them and said we wished we had parents like theirs. I don’t know about your neighborhood, but from mine, every last one of those people are either dead, in jail, or even worse: alive with no possibility of a successful future. That’s the outcome of years and years of indifference.

If you want to get in shape, you get a physical trainer that stays on you and makes you eat healthy and workout. You don’t get an indifferent person who allows the occasional triple cheeseburger or the half mile run that was supposed to be four miles; that would be senseless. Same applies to every other aspect of life. Surround yourself with indifferent people and yes it may be convenient, but trust, you’ll end up in very bad shape in the long run.

I always randomly jot down lines from songs, movies, and books as I go through my day. Here’s a few that I feel like sharing.

“My life could be so much easier, and the people around me much more at ease, if I just accepted things as they were as opposed to always trying to change them. But then what good would I be? What good will they be?”-Phella

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”-Maya Angelou

“When a great team loses through complacency, it will constantly search for new and more intricate explanations to explain away defeat”-Pat Riley

“You’re all welcome, as long as you felt him, I was gonna get mine if you know where the hell I’m from”-Jay-Z

“From now on I want you to put an equal amount of blueberries in each muffin”-Sam Rothstein

“You got an all out prize fight. You wait till the fight’s over and whoever’s left standing, that’s how you know who won”-Forgot where I got this from

“The worst thing about giving 100% to everything is the feeling you get when it doesn’t quite work the way you intended. However, I’m almost certain it feels worse to live a life where you only give 30%”-Phella

He says this a lot. Probably because it’s very true. Some people believe in being the big fish in a little pond but you don’t learn much that way. Surrounding yourself with people greater than you are is the best way to test who you are as a person.

“In this world full of diseases/I learned not to bite my tongue or have seizures.”-Joe Budden

Clever wordplay as well as real talk. The biggest mistake kids make in school is when the teacher says “any questions”, there’s always two or three people who have questions to ask but they won’t out of fear for what their classmates might think or how the teacher might react. Those kids usually fail the test.

Even in adulthood people stay in jobs and relationships they don’t like, all because of that fear to speak up. People also miss out on jobs and potential relationships for the very same reason.

Basically say what you have to say everyday because you aren’t guaranteed tomorrow, nor is the person you might want to say it to. Even if it’s something they may not like. Just say it. The only time I’ve ever felt true regret is when I didn’t say something I wanted or needed to say.

That’s why bloggers/musicians/journalists/psychologists got it so good. When done correctly, all of those jobs allow you to speak your mind without censorship. I HAVE ALL FOUR JOBS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“….An important attribute in successful people is their impatience with negative thinking and negative acting people. The simple but true fact of life is that you become like those with whom you closely associate for the good and the bad.”

Often I see people (myself especially) being accused of being “impatient” or “mean” when it comes to dealing with negative people. This quote dispels that myth. If you’re a positive person and a person striving for success, you deserve to surround yourself with people who are on the same path. Anything else is uncivilized.