It is important to spend quality time to discover your strength and weakness, so that people will not impose their own perception of you on your life. We live in a world where people would observe your lifestyle from the outside and come to a conclusion that you are a certain kind of person. They would not stop at that but they will continue to spread this notion to other people.
Photo by Ivelin Radkov from ISTOCKPHOTO
There are people who feel they know you more than you know yourself and the mental image they created of you may affect your life if you haven't discovered yourself. You may be forced to believe their own narrative since you do not even know yourself. In other words, they will be in absolute control of your life. They'd dictate to you the decision you should make and the ones you shouldn't make.
These people who interfere with your life have the believe that they know everything about you and know what it best for you. They'd want to become the author of the story of your life and unfortunately many people have given these type of people total control over them. They accept the identity that is being created by people instead of embarking on the journey of self-discovery. It is more alarming when a person gives more than one person that power to control them, this means that you'd have to contend with having multiple identities.
For a person who have not taken time to discover their identity and purpose in life, they may have no option than following the identity friends, family, culture, religion, and the society at large create for them. Often times, these imposition may not bring out their full potential in life and they will end up being unhappy, miserable and unproductive. It is crucial to discover yourself because that is where you happiness lies. You can not be happy when you are acting as someone else or when you can't make key decisions in your life without the interference of other people.
Most of the time people create narratives that will be in their favor as opposed to stating the truth. This may be linked to greed, envy, jealousy, etc. There are times people would have told you so many bad things about a particular person but the moment you get to know the person you'd discover that everything that was said was false. The person giving you a false impression or information may have a personal issue with the person in question and they want to tarnish the person's image. If you didn't discover the truth yourself, you'd have been stuck with the idea in your head.
However, you must be intentional about discovering yourself if you don't want the opinion of other people to overshadow your true self. You'd be one step ahead of those that want to shape and take control of your life if you discover yourself by yourself.