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 (1) you can’t please everyone and (2) you shouldn’t try to please everyone. The journalist who’s famous for today’s quote understood that achieving anything of great value often involves taking big risks and subjecting yourself to criticism. More often than not, you’re bound to upset others when you rattle the status quo or defend a point of view.

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. ~CL

Subscribers:  You can help support Life Lines by sharing the posts with friends. Life Lines is always free to readers — I pay the cost of the subscription service so that you don’t have to. Read the posts in your browser (click below) to find social media sharing options in the lower right corner of each post.