In a World Where You’re Accepted by Everyone—You’re Prioritised by No One

Most people think being liked is the ultimate social currency. You’re easy to get along with, you avoid friction, and you fit comfortably into every room. But there is a hidden, long-term cost to being the person nobody has a problem with: when it actually comes to the opportunities that matter, you aren’t the first name that comes up. You’ve become someone who is very easy to accept, but incredibly easy to ignore.

In this episode of The Long Game, we explore:

• The High Cost of Agreeableness: Why social harmony often comes at the expense of personal leverage and respect.
• Likability vs. Priority: The uncomfortable reason why being "easy to manage" makes you the last person chosen for a promotion or a pivot.
• The Tolerance Trap: How you are actively training people to overlook you by what you consistently allow.
• The Resentment Loop: Why "keeping the peace" for others creates an internal war you have to live with every day.

We are breaking down the reality that people don't prioritise what doesn't require it. If your presence carries no weight because you’re afraid to create a little friction, you aren't just being "nice"—you’re issuing a self-warrant for stagnation. We dive into the psychology of signaling and why your standards must stop being optional if you want your life to change.

Stop asking how to be more accepted and start asking why you aren’t being chosen. You don’t get what you want in this life; you get what you tolerate. It’s time to stop being a background character in your own story and start showing up with the intent and the standards that demand a seat at the table.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The reality in life is you don't always get it right. Seldom actually do we get it right in the majority of times. With wisdom and hindsight it would be a wonderful life that we all lived. And the with the reality of life, and I suppose of people, is that the times we get it right are few and far between. There's always something we could have done better. Effort, consideration and a want is truly all we have in life when it comes to moving forward. That's what I've come to realise. The result could be good, the result could be bad, and I mean I'll always want it to be good, of course, but it's not always the case. My intent, however, is something I'll always know is pure. I think honestly that's all we have. The more we live in this world, around one another, through all of our battles, through all of our scars, that when at the end of it all, did you do it with a pure intention? That's perhaps the thing that we should all cling on to. I mean I've not been one to journal or seek therapy, and rightly or wrongly, I think I've said this before. This has always almost become it for me, this podcast. As I walk through ideas, I find myself reviewing my own life, situations and moments each week, each month, with the very lens that I talk about. Perfect, I'm not. No will I ever be. But pure is what I'm proud to say I strive for. Faults, I have plenty of them. Mistakes I'll make daily, not intentionally, but I will, and I'll learn along the way. Perhaps my mistakes are made so others can learn. I mentioned before metal only bends under the pressure of heat, and that at the end of life that we have and that we receive, you must be proud of the sculpture that effectively stands before you. Mine bends loops and kinks right now. By the end of it, I know my goals and what I want this thing to look like, and I'll do so with the intent to know that the sculpture before me is how I want it to look when all is said and done with my life. And I think you also need some solid dance partners in life. So it's not just about you, it's also about the people you surround yourself with in life. And with that I mean friends, I mean families and relationships. When you want to live in such a way, not always that appeases, and sometimes you have the abilities to get it wrong, and may seem very different to the general population, you have to have the right people around you. Thankful to say I've built a life that encompasses all of those people and remove those who pull it back. Anyways, that was just a little thought I had last night when all the lights were shut off, and I thought it might be worth sharing before we dig into it today. And I think also it kind of lines up nicely with today's topic, so we'll dive right on in on that. So about seven or eight years ago, I did the I joined a course with Jordan Peterson, and one of the things that we did was a personality test. First time I'd ever done one. And one of the things that came up with was points like agreeableness and assertiveness, and there's various different elements. There's the the big five, and this one broke it down into the big ten effectively. But to kind of give a broader scope on what we're going to talk about today is this idea that if you are liked by everyone, you're prioritized by no one. You'll see it in the title. So it comes down to kind of this, right? So high agreeableness correlates with likability, but often at the expense of assertiveness, boundary setting, and influence. So the two aren't mutually aligned, the two kind of clash with each other. You kind of typically aren't going to be high agreeableness and then also be assertive. You're either one or the other, typically. I, based on personality test, have a moderate agreeableness, but a high assertiveness in mind. It increases social harmony when you do have a high agreeableness, but also reduces personal leverage. And those who avoid friction are often deprioritized in group hierarchies. Being agreeable creates immediate social rewards, so acceptance, but long-term cost, i.e. lack of respect, missed opportunities, and an internal dissatisfaction longer down the line. So you know when you're someone that people generally like, you don't have issues with anyone, you're easy to get along with, you don't create friction in conversations or situations, and for the most part, you fit into those rooms pretty comfortably. There's no drama around you, no real tension, and on the surface, that looks like a really good place to be. But then when it actually comes to something that truly matters, whether that's being chosen for an opportunity or being the person someone turns to in a moment of need, or even just being taken seriously in a room, you're not the first name that typically comes up. Now, at first, you can brush that off and say you were just overlooked, or it just wasn't your moment or time in life, but when it keeps happening, you do have to stop and question it a little bit. This is where it gets a little bit uncomfortable because being nice isn't the issue. I'm not saying you need to swing the other way and become difficult or hard to deal with, but there is a line between having standards and just being easy for everyone to manage, and I think a lot of people drift into that without the realization that it's actually happening. You end up becoming someone who's very easy to accept, but at the same time, very easy to ignore. And there's a line that I there's a there's a phrase I heard it on Joel Rogan where it is it's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. And I think this is a similar rhetoric to that. In a world where you're accepted by everyone, you're prioritised by no one. Sounds harsh, but if you actually let that sit for a moment, there's kind of some truth in it. Because we talk a lot, or at least I do, on here, about internal thought processes, how you think, the stories you tell yourself, the beliefs you carry around without really ever questioning them. And most of the time that's where the work is. So I think probably 80, 85% of the time, that's where the work in. Internal, it's reflective, it's really about how you're interpreting things and how your perception of things are in life. This one's a little bit more external, and this isn't just about how you think, it's about how you're showing up, your conscious awareness in the moment, and how that constantly shapes how other people respond to you over a period of time. So a lot of what we've talked about is the idea of the internal and how you show up in the moment and changing those. Today's really is more about how this affects you long term, both externally and internally, when it comes to how you feel about the situation, but also how you're perceived by others. Because whether you realize it or not, people are constantly learning how to deal with you. People are always learning how to deal with you. They're picking up on what you'll tolerate, what you let slide, where your standards are, and where they're not, right? So let's best example of this, right? And and quite often with analogies and examples, right, is as we get into the human as human, I say that human, I mean adult life, is that often you can come back to being kids. So a child will typically, right? When a child is born and first starts to walk and talk and do those things, it's always trying to find out where the boundaries are because a child has no boundaries, it has no internal mechanism in its brain to think that don't touch the cookie jar or don't touch the hot stove or don't touch the hot radiator. It doesn't have any of those boundaries built in. It's not like they're an inherent defense mechanism that is built in like a lion or a tiger or a giraffe where these babies are born and they just have this defense instinct to not do these things. I mean, human babies are pretty respectfully, I'll use the word dumb when they're born, which is why they need adults around them to protect them from such a young age. We're one of the very few species who actually require our mothers and fathers to be around us and protect us for such an elongated period of time. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, you might say, right, that you have to be around to be looked after. That is abnormal in the grand scheme of 90% of animal species in this world. So to go back to this, it's the child has no understanding of the boundaries. So that's what the child will effectively do is push the boundaries until it finds out where those are. So it will eat as many cookies until they're sick, until they find out where their limit is. They will touch the radiator for as long enough to realize that it's hot, and they'll start to work out where these things are. The best example is how they can push their parents with certain things, i.e., how much can they be mischievous before the parents lose their mind and snap? That is exactly the same thing. We do that in our hierarchies, by the way, all the time, especially when you go into new jobs, new careers, new rooms, new friendship circles. It's exactly the same. We will literally try and see where the boundaries are with one another so that over the period of time we know where each other stands. I'll bring my friendship group into it. Kay, John, Dave, Brownie, right, you guys. I'll talk about them a little later in the episode about this, right? Is when you first joined a group like that, right? Five guys, and they are they were an established group. They were an established group. They were my best my older brother was very good friends with them all, and then later in life, I kind of he moved to America and I kind of just kind of naturally joined the group, started going out, we started going out together and whatnot. I remember in those early phases, and again, this took months, if not years, to really understand the boundaries of one another, of who we all were as people and what we'll accept and what we will let slide and what jokes we can all accept and where we draw the line when it comes to certain things that we believe are important to ourselves. Kieran knows if Kieran's listening, he'll know exactly what I'm talking about in this moment. Uh, we've talked about this scenario where it happened where he I think learnt what my boundaries were with certain things, and again, but the the joke side, I think, is all all guys, I think majority guy group guy groups, our our boundaries for jokes. I think there is none in that regard, but when it comes to standards and our beliefs and what we our morality and what we'll stand up for, I think there's definitely that, and it took a few months and years to get to that point, but again, that's what we're always doing, we're always trying to find where those boundaries are. And there's a lot of talk by the way, and I I give you the contrast of that of kind of like my background and my history, because I think there's a lot of talk in modern culture about being liked and being accepted and being easy to work with, and you hear it everywhere. Be a good person, be easy, don't create problems, and that all sounds right on the surface. I think it sounds utopian, it sounds very nice, and if we can all do that, the problem is that as species, you're always going to have ones who rise above that, and they're always gonna want people to push the boundaries. And there's a big difference between being accepted and being prioritized, and I think that's where people get caught out. You can be in every room, you can be included in everything, and you can be someone that's nobody has a problem with, and still not be the person that gets chosen when it actually matters, that stands out that is the one that people lean on, and that's where it starts to feel off a little bit because on the surface everything looks fine, especially to you and to generally other people, but underneath it, you know something isn't quite lining up, and that's where I talk about the internal strain that it starts to play on you when you're in these rooms and you're starting to feel like this that actually maybe being liked by everyone wasn't the key thing, it was to be prioritized and to have standards and to know when to show up and show those things. And there's a reason people talk a lot about the difference between liked and being respected, and when you look those that you probably look up to, sports stars, they're not the same thing. They if you optimize for one, you often sacrifice the other without realizing it, truth be told. Sports stars, by the way, are great examples of this. High performing CEOs, exactly great examples of this. They know the difference and can play, I would say that they can play the roles of when they need to be accepted versus when they need to be prioritized. It's quite a good skill set to have, and again, it's uh something that you've got to work on and learn through the whole time of your life, it'll never be perfect. And I think the truly uncomfortable part of it is none of that is random. We talked a little bit about earlier about these scenarios and situations, because it's not just people are going to be overlooking you by chance, it's not always about someone else being better or more capable. A lot of the time it comes down to what your behavior has been signalling over a longer period of time. Because whether you realize it or not, people are constantly taking cues from how you show up. Not what you say, but what your standards are, not what you intend, but what you constantly allow. That's what sticks, that's what people learn. And there's a quote that gets thrown around a lot, but it applies perfectly here, and it's about Hormuz, he talks about it. And he talks about the idea that you don't get what you want, you get what you tolerate. And when you actually look at it through that lens, it makes a lot of sense. If you tolerate being overlooked, you train people to effectively overlook you. If you tolerate being second, you train people to treat you second. If you train a muscle to lift a certain weight, it will begin to tear and it will begin to repair so that it can lift that weight. You're always training, and again, you're training people, whether you're training yourself, whether you're training your mind, everywhere you look, we walk around this world sometimes a little bit unconscious to these things. Like these things are happening to us when in actual fact we have a lot of control over these things. So if you're the person who keeps things smooth, avoids pushing back, even though in the room or the conversation you know that it's a problem. Goes along with the decisions even when you're not fully aligned, but then complains by the way two weeks later, and generally makes life easy for everyone that becomes your that becomes your identity in the room, effectively. And that's by the way, it's not about work or sorry, just about work, it's about your peers, it's about friends, it's about family. And once that's established, it doesn't take long before people start checking in with you in the same way. Not out of disrespect, by the way, necessarily, but because there's no real consequence if they don't. And that's just the reality of it. We've created that reality. And you can see this play out quite dramatically in the way that people behave in loads of different environments. Like I said, work, personal, it can be friends, it could be family. You could probably watch it at Christmas dinner or birthday lunches. In work settings, though, in social groups, even in friendships, there's usually someone who keeps things easy. They don't really challenge it much, they don't create tension, they're reliable, they go along with everything, and everyone genuinely gets on with them. But when something actually needs deciding, when there's pressure or when someone needs to step forward or take something or a position or whatever, that person isn't the one anyone really looks to. And there's a concept that Robert Green talks about a lot, which is that people respond to signals more than intentions, and it's not what you mean to do, it's what your behavior communicates. And I'm what and I'm working on this by the way all the time, right? And big part of my life right now is especially again is this new relationships, new people. So again, you guys know I moved to the US. I'm in a very fairly new relationship over the last six, seven months, and I'm understanding what their standards are, and their understanding what mine are and how that dynamic works and shifts as we work it out. And and I don't think that that's a again, I talk about this a lot, but I don't think that ever goes away. I think it's a constant evolution, and you learn one little part, but then there's another little nuance that comes to it, and then another nuance, and even then I have to work out how I need to behave and how I need to communicate that back that effectively. And yeah, I mean, at 34-year-olds, if you think that you suddenly are professional at this at 18 because you read one book, I think you're probably sadly mistaken. Again, like my personal journey, I'm going on it all the time. Every time I'm meeting new people, I'm in a brand new culture now in the US, where I'm meeting new people all the time and understanding what their standards are and their ideas and values are and beliefs and how they believe that things should be trapped. Because, contrary to belief, the UK and the US are very different in that regard of how we move forward and how we handle things and even certain conversations that we do things. So, again, I'm going through that all the time of this idea that yeah, what what signals am I putting out rather than my intentions? Because uh again, my intentions are always pure, right? And I'll always hold that very dear to me, like I said at the start. But I also got to make sure that the signal is correct as well. Of because I think that I'm doing something right, and but again, then the activity doesn't match up with that, and that's where again I've got to I personally am working all that all the time. You see, if your behavior is constantly communicates that you don't push back and that you'll just go along, and if you keep things easy, then people are going to adjust to that. Whereas the person who's willing to question things, who has a line and sticks to it, even if it creates a bit of friction, becomes someone who takes people take more seriously because they respect them more ultimately. That's again, it comes down to that in social hierarchies. It often comes down to the word respect, and respect is earned, not given, and it has to be short, you have to show up to get it. And I don't mean that to be like not louder or not more aggressive in the way that you act, just someone whose presence carries more weight realistically. Again, my friends, I talked about this in the early phases, was exactly that. I've been on this part of my journey for well over a decade now, and I don't think it's ever going to go away as you progress. I'll for another decade I'll be the same thing again. And it's by the way, it's very easy to fall back into old habits, which is why I'm so passionate about the idea of constantly learning and having conversations when things don't seem right or we disagree on things, and if someone feels uncomfortable, I'd rather you come spoke to me about it. Because I can learn from that, I can then adapt and move past those things to get better at whatever it is that you need from me, and vice versa, when it happens from my end, then I communicate it outwards. And if you want to get on board and try and work with me on this, then absolutely. Because I think, like I said, that's the thing that we get wrong a lot. We work on it and we kind of almost set and forget it, and it's rarely ever trained and developed. And I think if your ego lets you think in a few months' work and that you figured out all of them, we probably need to have a little bit of a different conversation. We definitely probably need to have a different conversation, truth be told. But most people don't realize that they've built this by the way, right? And they assume that if they're good to be around, everything's fine, and people will just like I said, we just don't prioritize yet, and the pattern becomes ridiculously predictable, right? It just becomes constant. You stay agreeable, you avoid friction, you get accepted, but you don't get chosen. That's the reality of it, and it loop it that loop just constantly goes round and round, and now it's just a part of your life, and I think that's the thing that I want to kind of touch on next is this internal cost to you, myself included, by the way, because I used to be one of these people that was kind of agreeable in a group, right? And just went along with the status quo, and at the time there's no real obvious issue to it at that stage, there genuinely isn't, because you're always included and you're always involved, nothing really feels like it's broken down, so you're always a part of the crowd and you're always part of the thing. But I think internally it starts to feel different the longer that it goes on, and at that moment you have a choice to make of what you want it to look like because you're gonna start to realize you get a little bit more frustrated around certain scenarios and situations, they start to irritate you just a little bit more than they used to, and you often feel like you're holding back more than you ever wanted to, and there's a reason for that, by the way. So again, Jordan Peterson talks a lot about how people who don't speak up, who don't set boundaries, end up resentful, not immediately, but over time, because you know when you're letting things slide that shouldn't be. You know when you're not holding your position properly, and that creates a tension that you're the one who has to live with, and you kept the peace for everyone else, but you're the one sitting there knowing it's not quite right. And honestly, that is uh again, go step back a little bit for a second there. Let's go back to the idea of if you don't speak up, you don't set boundaries, you end up resentful, and the only person you end up resentful for is one of two ways. You either look internally at yourself or you expose it back outwards towards everyone else in a certain group of people. Perhaps maybe that's where we're at in the world's in some parts, I don't know, in society, right? Not to talk about society in in this conversation, really, but really when I think if you look at the internal, again, I've said this many, many times. My barometer of I suppose success sometimes is to look at it and say, I have to sit there at night and and be happy with myself. I have to be the one that lays there when all the lights are shut off and all the everything's turned off, the phone's down, the lights are off, the TV's off. There's nothing but the birds slight chirp at you know 11 o'clock or whatever. That I have to be happy with the life that I created. I have to be happy with how I acted that day and how I developed and trained myself and got to the next phase of my life. That truthfully is you as well, I believe. You have to be able to speak up and set boundaries. And I'll wrap this little bit up with this simple thing. But it's another Jordan Peterson uh quote who's talking about relationships. I'd rather have a thousand mini fights than one big fight. The reason being I'd rather have the thousand mini fights because it sets the tone and it sets the standards and we know where each other stands. I want to be respected, and I want the person that in my relationships, whether it's my partner, whether it's friends, to also feel respected in that regard. And again, that's not about this utopian always getting it right. It's this idea that I will constantly try and be better and be that version, and I want people around me to be the same thing on that. If not, it effectively is going to become your default that you constantly keep that internal dread and that internal angst, and you just really become the easiest to ignore. So you don't just suddenly feel nothing dramatic is going to happen, but you quietly miss out on everything around you that you are more than capable of stepping into. So the life that you think you should have got keeps slowly slipping away, and the longer it goes on, it stops becoming slowly slipping away and becomes very fast. And that there was no one else to blame other than yourself. When talking about this scenario, there was no one else to blame other than yourself in that regard. And I mean that not to demoralize you, but maybe just a little bit of a reality that goes, you are ultimately in control of everything that happens from you day this day forward. From the moment you heard this podcast, from the moment you heard this and you thought, oh, that's a little bit different and making me think different, potentially, right? I was talking about the idea of I can affect one person. If you then sit there and think that, now's the time to go change it. Michael Jordan says, right, I've missed more than 9,000 uh shots in my career. Yeah, and that is why it succeeds. The point being, the people who get chosen are usually the ones willing to step forward, take the shot, and risk missing it every time. You see, if you never put yourself in a position, if you stay in the background keeping things smooth, you remove yourself from the opportunity entirely. The opportunity won't come for you. And we talked about this in earlier episodes on the podcast, about proximity being a key part to opportunities. If you never take the shot, you're never going to know, right? And if you never challenge the status quo, you're never going to know if you could get something different. Because the reality is it could just be on the other side of a conversation, but the other person doesn't really isn't aware of how they can help. They want to help, they want to bring you in, but there's just a belief there that you're actually not that bothered and you're just agreeable, so you'll go along with what everyone else wants. And over time, something else starts to happen. You don't just stay where you are, but you start adjusting yourself to fit it. So you then start to lower your expectations slightly. So you stop pushing back as much. You settle into your role you've created for yourself, and from the outside, everything now's going to look fine to everyone else, but internally you know you're not really moving forward. You're maintaining, but you're not progressing. So the shift here isn't about becoming difficult or forcing your way into situations. I don't want that to be the thought process today, but I think it's about recognizing where you've been defaulting to just being easy and starting to decide where that actually serves you and where it doesn't. Because there's a version of you being agreeable that's useful, and it's keeping things efficient and avoids unnecessary friction. But there's also a version of you where you've removed any unnecessary reason for people to treat you differently. So Jock O'Willick talks a lot about discipline and ownership, and this sits in that very space. At some point, you have to take responsibility for how you're being treated by changing how you show up. You don't need to create conflict, by the way, for the sake of it, but you do need to be someone who's willing to step into it when it matters most. So just take a step back for a second and look at your own situation, honestly. Where in your life are you the one that keeps things easy? Where are you letting things slide when you probably shouldn't? Where are you easy to accept but not really being chosen? Because there's always going to be a trade-off. You don't get to be completely accepted everywhere without giving up something in return. And the uncomfortable part of all that is that it isn't random. This is something that we've been building over time. And because what you've really done is trained people to accept you without needing to prioritize you. That doesn't change by accident, it changes the moment your standards stop being optional.