May 19Your True Fans
The richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable. We hate the kindness which we understand. A noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence: none so exalts the giver and the receiver; it produces the truest gratitude. Perhaps it is only essential to friendship that some vital trust should have been reposed by the one in the other. I feel addressed and probed even to the remote parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me.
Henry David Thoreau—Familiar Letters (1865)
Find your tribe, those who have unspoken faith in you, and build a commitment to making their lives better for having revealed this trust.
This is, in many ways, the ultimate commitment of self-reliance and self-trust. You can't take everyone with you, and you shouldn't try. In this socially connected world of wispy “connections,” it bears reminding that a handful of true fans is the “richest gift.”
Author Seth Godin sums up this call to action in his book Tribes beautifully:
Yes, I think it's okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It's okay to say to them, “You're not going where I need to go, and there's no way I'm going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I'm heading off. I'm betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.”
Challenge Question
- Where are your true fans?
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