People pleasing

“I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: Try to please everybody all the time.” ~ Herbert Bayard Swope, American journalist

One of the gifts of aging is the realization that we can’t please everyone. The journalist who’s famous for today’s quote understood that achieving success often involves taking risks. Whether we’re creating a piece of art or expressing an idea in print, we risk upsetting others if we rattle the status quo or challenge a tribal norm.

Born in 1882, Herbert Bayard Swope was a famous war correspondent and editor of the New York World. He was the first journalist to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1917, and established the first modern op-ed page in 1921.

Swope also served as the editor for New York World’s crusade against the Ku Klux Klan in October 1921, which won the newspaper the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service the following year. This piece of investigative journalism ranked 81st of the top 100 journalism stories of the 20th century by New York University’s journalism department.

Are you comfortable expressing your own views, even when they clash with someone else’s? If not, why? ~CL