June 8
Reputation is what others think of you; character is what you truly are. And it shows itself not in great things but in small ones, when no one is watching.
Character (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Reputation is what others think of you; character is what you truly are. And it shows itself not in great things but in small ones, when no one is watching.
You have a reputation with yourself, too. It is made up of moments you remember: a difficult decision, a sentence you stood by, an evening when you helped someone. Those moments carried weight, which is why they have stayed with you.
The small things, by contrast, you hardly retain. How you speak about someone who has just left the room. Whether you keep a promise no one would remind you of anymore. What you do with the time you gain when a task is finished sooner than expected. You rarely decide such things consciously. They simply happen, and precisely for that reason they are missing from your picture of yourself.
Still, they don't go entirely unobserved. Anyone who has lived or worked with you for a while knows some of these habits better than you do. Such people could hardly tell you anything you don't already know – only things you never thought worth mentioning.
Whether you want to hear what they have noticed is another question. You would probably recognise yourself in it, though not altogether gladly.
