We're all susceptible to some sort of vanity metric in our lives.

When I first started as an educator, I wanted to be liked.

I wanted to be that interesting teacher who's chill about things going off the rails, cool with my students being students, and savvy about the things they were interested in.

If I really think about it, I wanted to be the teacher I never had when I was a student - one I could relate to and see as less of an authority figure, more a person I could look up to.

And it wasn't that difficult. Most of my students weren't that much younger than me.

We were able to relate to fairly similar cultural icons and had similar life experiences.

I can't really tell if I succeeded in being liked, but I know that my efforts towards infusing relevant things into lessons and making my presentations as interesting as possible (because I, too, had some horrendously boring teachers) were not wasted.

Till today, I make these 2 things - relevance and interesting talking points - my top priorities in any of my programmes and lessons.

And I've received feedback, from past students (now friends), present students, and other educators, that they enjoy sitting in my sessions.

So perhaps it's not necessarily a bad thing to have a vanity metric if it results in serving others.