Prompt #28
"If your number one goal is to make sure that everyone likes and approves of you, then you risk sacrificing your uniqueness and, therefore, your excellence."

Oh, where did you find that? It sounds like Niccolò, although less convoluted. Ma, bene. Bear in mind that Niccolò wrote for Medici, his last attempt at bootlicking if you will, and such advice given to a ruler he professed to hate before... advice to crush the opposition - upfront, visibly, ruthlessly, if at all possible: pre-emptively... is best coated with the sugar of verbosity to make it grandiloquent, humanist, and most learnèd.

And yet: colour me surprised you would phrase it thus, with so little ado, so stingy on the sable lining. I fear there's a possibility I may have misread you; perhaps you're on about individuality and friendship and other such silly things? Perhaps you're simply trying to teach people to love themselves more? What a ghastly notion. Go right ahead and give the serfs ideas.

Now, as Niccolò said, "Therefore, he who considers it necessary to secure himself in his new principality, to win friends, to overcome either by force or fraud, to make himself beloved and feared by the people, to be followed and revered by the soldiers, to exterminate those who have power or reason to hurt him, to change the old order of things for new, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to destroy a disloyal soldiery and to create new, to maintain friendship with kings and princes in such a way that they must help him with zeal and offend with caution, cannot find a more lively example than the actions of this man."

"This man" being myself.

You laugh. Well, laugh while you may. And count yourself lucky time has meliorated my temper.