Jennifer Wagner Chartier

Anybody who makes you earn their love doesn't love you. Love is a gift. It's freely given. You can't transact your way to it the way you can transact your way to a promotion or a good grade. The very thing that makes love love is that it isn't conditional. The moment it becomes conditional, it stops being love and becomes something else. Approval, perhaps. Or maybe usefulness. Worth a great deal, sure, but not love. The people who get this wrong are usually the people who are good at earning things. Strivers. If you've spent your life learning how to earn every reward the world offers, you'll bring that machinery to your most important relationships. You'll work harder. You'll be more useful. You'll perform. You'll people-please. The truth is, people-pleasing is outsourcing your self-worth. You're letting other people decide what you're worth and adjusting until they tell you the answer you want. If they like me, I'm okay. If they don't, I'm not. That's a brutal contract to live under… and the worst part is you signed it yourself. Most people who do this learned it in childhood. Somewhere along the line, they processed the lesson that love is conditional — that affection had to be earned through good grades, good behavior, the right kind of smile. So they kept earning. They became excellent at it, and they never stopped. Stop confusing love with approval. Keep loving the people in your life; just stop trying to win them. Insource your sense of who you are. Receive what's freely given. When somebody requires payment, pay attention.

I've noticed that one of the most common mistakes ambitious people make is believing that happiness is waiting on the other side of achievement. In behavioral science, we call this the arrival fallacy. It's the idea that once you reach the next milestone, get the promotion, earn the recognition, or accomplish the goal, you'll finally feel fulfilled. But satisfaction doesn't come from arriving. It almost always comes from making progress toward something meaningful. That's why goals are important, but they are not the reward. The pursuit is.