reputation vs character

“be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”

~john wooden

another source of unhappiness: we are always too concerned with what the rest of the world thinks of us when it doesn't really matter in the end. ralph waldo emerson writes more on this subject on his work, self-reliance: "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."