Don't lose yourself trying to be what you think others want you to be.

Note to self (taken from an article in hbr)

Learn to appreciate the power of authenticity, especially your own. Reflect on what you feel when you are in the presence of someone who is being inauthentic: pity, disgust, but never respect. Keep in mind this is what others will feel, sooner or later, if you try to be something you fundamentally are not. This is true even — in fact especially — if you are trying to be what you think others want you to be. For as the poet e.e. cummings put it so powerfully, "To be nobody but myself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make me somebody else — means to fight the hardest battle any human can fight."