You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.

Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired Magazine says:

You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

People and businesses will often announce to everyone who will listen, that X, Y, and Z is important to them and then the following week we watch them diametrically acting in the opposite direction.

For example a potential client would proudly announce on their website: "We are a customer centered organization. The customer always comes first." Okay cool. Except that in reality they have never done a customer interview before and their real life customer service is mediocre at best. Or somebody tells you: "I love your project, let's do something together", never to be heard from again. Or "I am going start a business", never putting one hour towards his goal.

How are we to make sense of the fact that people don't do what they say they will do?

And please don't get me wrong, I too have found that it's hard to clearly articulate my own priorities, and I'm the first to admit that I am not shy of using (a lot of) words.

So both for myself and for the people I come in contact with, I found it to be much more revealing to observe my/their actions. Because what a person actually does is the only thing that counts. Words are cheap and dime a dozen.

You and I can say all day long that we're customer centric, wanna open our own businesses, hang out more with our family, read two books a month or need to fix the dishwasher, but our actions will always reveal the truth. It's so much more reliable to look at your own or someone else's actions to determine the underlying priorities and accept that words are simply stories we all tell ourselves (and others).

When you need perspective, I found this to be such a helpful tool for making decisions that involve other people or to reassess my own trajectory.