One of the hardest parts of growing up isn’t paying bills, balancing a career or learning how quickly life changes. It’s realizing no matter how hard you try, someone is always going to walk away unhappy. As children, we are taught working hard matters. We learn to be honest, treat people with respect, admit when we are wrong and give our best effort. Those lessons shape the kind of adults we become and they should. They are good lessons because they remind us character is built by the choices we make every day.

For a long time, I believed those lessons also came with an unspoken promise. If you worked hard enough, prepared well enough and genuinely tried to do the right thing, people would recognize the effort. They might not always agree with you, but they would at least understand where you were coming from.

The older I get, the more I realize life does not work that way. It took years to understand there is a difference between doing something well and making everyone happy. The two …