We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of…

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, well others judge us by what we have already done. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

— from The Relationship With Yourself (Traits/Reflection) · It’s all in your Head, written by Stephen Pollan and Mark Levine

In the book

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Sample epigraph — replace with one of your own, or with a line of mine you remember me saying.) We are about to open the cockpit door and turn, in the chapters ahead, to all the other people in your life — your family, your friends, the strangers you will share the sky with. […] Almost all human misery about the self comes from living by the outer one, from chasing a score kept by people whose opinion you will not remember in a decade. The poet said it plainly in the line at the top of this chapter: we judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us only by what we have already done — so if you let the others keep score, you will always feel like a fraud, because they cannot see the effort or the intention, only the result. The healthier source of self-worth is built from the inside. — The Relationship With Yourself (Traits/Reflection)

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