169How can you tell if you’ve got a big enough and real
enough power goal? Simply observe the effect your goal
has on you. It’s not what a goal is that matters; it’s what
a goal does.
80. Change yourself first
Don’t change other people. It doesn’t work. You’ll
waste your life trying.
Many of us spend all our time trying to change the
people in our lives. We think we can change them in
ways that will make them better equipped to make us
happy. This is especially true of our children. We talk
to our children for hours about how we think they should
change. But children don’t learn from what we say. They
learn from what we do.
Today’s children, upon hearing us talk to them about
how they should change will often say, “Yeah, right.” I
think they got this phrase from Bart Simpson. It’s short-
hand for “I’m not listening to what you say, I’m listen-
ing to what you do.”
Gandhi was especially tuned in to the futility of
changing other people. Yet Gandhi was probably respon-
sible for more change in people than any other person
in our era was. How did he do it? He had a profoundly
simple formula. People would often come to Gandhi to
ask how they could change others. Someone would say,
“I agree with you about nonviolence, but there are oth-
ers who don’t. How do I change them?” And Gandhi told
them they couldn’t. He said you couldn’t change other
people.
“You must be the change you wish to see in others,”
said Gandhi. In my own seminars, I probably use that
one quotation more than any other. I am always asked,
Change yourself first