Assignment 19 - Erin Caudill

The best - and most cliche - piece of advice I've ever gotten is to not let other peoples' opinions of me affect what I think of myself. I'm naturally a very self-conscious person, and for a really long time everything I did was dictated by how other people would react to what I was doing. I would act a certain way around certain people, and I'd be absolutely miserable. If someone likes being around you when you're being someone you aren't, life gets pretty miserable. Eventually I realized that it's better to be as socially awkward and laugh as loud as you want at dumb jokes that everyone else hates if it makes you happy than to do something that makes you miserable. It's some pretty solid advice even though it seems pretty straightforward. However, if you're a psychopath maybe you shouldn't follow that advice because that wouldn't end too great for the rest of us.