My best friend’s mom made some negative predictions about my friend when he was a kid. The usual kinds of careless, throwaway, you’ll-never-amount-to-anything stuff. Decades later, none of those predictions came true. But my friend still believes them—it feels like they’re true.
Another friend, Erica, found a scratchpad note on the kitchen table titled, “Words that describe me.” Her daughter wrote words like, awesome, responsible, silly, and perseverant on the paper. Erica got weepy when she read it. “I realized these are words she heard from me.”
You have to be careful what you tell people. They might believe you. And they might believe you their whole life.
