Last week I was walking through town with my wife and our son in the stroller. We ran into a former high school classmate. We were both pleasantly surprised to see each other after so many years.

He looked at my wife and said: “He was always the cool guy in school.”

I laughed because it reminded me how much I cared about how I looked and what people thought of me back then.

For a sixteen-year-old, that’s probably normal. But at some point, you’ve got to stop living like that.

The thing is, most people don’t actually stop. They just trade one obsession for another.