Why Do You Care?

Why do you care? It’s a hard question to ask and an even harder one to answer. It causes you to push past the surface of your emotions and reactions and dive into the core of their origin.

There are many ways to interpret that question and each of those interpretations standardly comes with a unique answer. But no matter why your asking the question or what the answer may be, it’s important for you to understand what drives you and, sometimes, what stops you in your tracks.

Maybe the answers come easy to you. Maybe they don’t. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get to the bottom of that rabbit hole. All that matters is that you’re willing to ask yourself that question: “Why do I care?”

The iceberg of caring

When thinking about why you care about things, the goal isn’t to find an answer as quickly as possible and then move on. The act of caring is black and white; Either you care or you don’t. However, the reasoning behind why you care or don’t is usually very complex.

Your reasoning behind why something matters to you is very much like an iceberg. You’ll find those surface reasons pretty easily (like the “I care because it makes me happy” or the “I care because it’s a healthy choice”)but it’s the reasons beneath the surface, the why behind the why, that are really meaningful.

Don’t be afraid to explore and see how deep your iceberg goes. Finding the answers to these deeper “whys” will help you unlock a better understanding of yourself and what drives you to succeed.

Why do you care about the things that you do?

This is really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your self exploration behind why you care. Why do you care about the things that you care about? What are the reasons behind you caring about certain things when you couldn’t care less about others?

Why do you care to keep pushing yourself to be better?

Amongst those things that you care about, there are a certain few that you really latch onto. These select things become part of your everyday life, be it through your career, your hobbies, or even just something you really pay attention to.

But what separates these things from the others is that you feel a drive inside of you to keep pushing to be better at them. Maybe you want to be better at your job, maybe you want to be a better parent, maybe you want to be a better artist. What makes you want to push yourself to be better at those certain things? Can you identify the driving force behind your want to be better?

Why do you care about what others think about you?

One of the most common things that keeps us from doing things that we want to; The amount that we care about what others thing about us. Some people are less inhibited by this but a lot more people struggle with it (even if they don’t say that they do).

As much as you may hear it, it not as simple as “Just not caring about what others think about you” and sometimes there are good reasons to care about how you are perceived by others. However there are a lot of reasons that really don’t hold water. People may not like it; They may make fun of me; It’s not good enough; There are plenty of variations of these intrusive thoughts. All of them are slightly different but often lead to the same outcome, not releasing your work.

We tend to formulate answers to these questions and assume what the reactions of others would be. And we use those fictitious reactions to reinforce our anxiety and prevent us from doing what we want to or being ourselves. The truth is, however, we’re the ones that are holding ourselves back most of the time.

Deconstruct those intrusive thoughts that have you locked at a stalemate. What sits at the core of them? Are you hoping to be accepted? to be validated? to be seen as an expert? Understand what you are hoping to gain from being yourself or releasing your work to the world, what is truly driving you, what is keeping you from progressing.

So, why do you care about what others think about you? And are those reasons legitimate or are they just holding you back?

Why do you care to fail?

Most of us know that failure is a necessary evil when it comes to personal growth. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s an easy pill to swallow.

Regardless of how much you thicken your skin, failure hurts. And like most things that hurt us, we become reluctant to do anything that will lead to unnecessary discomfort — Eventually leading us to a fear of failure.

However, it’s not necessarily the failure that hurts you, it’s the repercussions of that failure. If you fail in a forest and no one’s around to witness it, does that failure still burn your ego?

All of us deal with a varying degree of fear of failure. But when you step back and really examine what you’re afraid of, why you care about not failing, you’ll notice that it’s not truly the failure that you’re afraid of.

“What will people think of me? I might get made fun of. I might get seen as an amateur, try-hard who doesn’t belong in the industry.” So on and so forth. All of these are reasons that most people are afraid to fail but none of them have to do with the failure itself, rather the interpretation of that failure by others.

Understanding why you’re afraid to fail begins the healing process for the fear that you may have started to build up. Knowing what’s at the core of your fears gives you a way to actually deal with it and conquer it.

So, why are you afraid to fail? Why do you care if you fail? What is worth it for you to fail for?

Why do you care to succeed?

These answers can be very powerful for you. On the surface, this question may seem very similar to “Why do you care to keep pushing yourself to be better?” It may, honestly, produce the same answer. However when thinking about why you care to succeed, I want you to take it a step further than before.

The first part of answering this question for yourself is the same as all of the questions I’ve asked above — answering it truthfully for yourself. Don’t be self conscious here, you have to be honest or else you’re doing this for nothing.

Sometimes our drivers are altruistic, sometimes they’re selfish. I’m not here to tell you what’s right or what’s wrong. I’m not here to tell you to change what motivates you. What’s important is that you know what does.

The thing that makes your drivers for success different from the answers to the previous questions is that you can use these answers to measure your success. As much as society tries to define it for us, success is a subjective thing that means something different to everyone. Your drive to succeed may be something like a job title, how many friends you have, how much money you have, the ability to provide for yourself or your family, etc. Any reason is a valid reason for wanting to succeed as long as it’s honest.

Now that you have your answers, you’re going to want to look at them through a lens of measurability. This is where you can give power to your answers, you can use them as measurements — See how you’re doing, spot check your progress and, when the going gets tough, reassure yourself that you’re doing the right thing.

Your driver to succeed is a goal and, where we often mess things up as humans, we use that goal in it’s totality as a measurement of success. That’s all well and good but a lot of these goals are huge — we want to be a CEO, we want to have millions of dollars, we want to buy a house, we want to have stable income — which only allows you to measure your success once you’ve achieved that goal. This isn’t a healthy way to measure your success and it will lead you to burning out really quickly.

A healthy and realistic measurement system is the key to your success. With your greater goal in mind, you’ll want to pull out steps and checkpoints on the pathway to your definition of success. Is your definition of success being able to purchase a house? Awesome, a good way to measure if you’re on the right track could be something like saving X amount of money each month for your down payment. As long as the amount that you’re planning on saving is realistic for you, you have a healthy way to measure your progress towards your greater goal of success.

Obviously, a lot of the reasonings behind why we care to succeed are very big but every one of them can be broken down into simple measurements and checkpoints for us to be able to monitor how we are doing in a healthy way.

So ask yourself, what makes you care enough to work harder, put in long hours and, when the going gets tough, pick yourself up and keep on moving? Are you able to measure your progress towards your bigger goal of success? And, most importantly, are your steps towards success actually attainable?

All of the answers to the questions above are valuable in understanding why you care about what you’re doing or, in some cases, not doing. They can help you understand your motivations and the things that get in your way. They can also help you take a look at the things that you're doing and assess if they’re worth doing / worth worrying about or if they aren’t.

So, why do you care?