One day, the best-dressed girl in the school, “Natty” Nancy Navarro, said to Ned, “You are a good-looking guy, but you dress terribly. Girls pay no attention to you — certainly not me.” Ned responded by asking her, “Why are you always so dressed up?” Caught off guard, the girl snapped, “I like to be called natty. I want to dress better than everyone else, and when I do, the other girls stare at me and are jealous because they know that I am more attractive to guys than they are. Ned just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Not to me.”
Furious, Nancy stormed off but could not stop thinking about Ned. While she disliked his clothes, she admired his plainspoken ways. Unlike other boys, he was courteous and seemed to speak from his heart, with no intention of saying what he did not feel. Then, on a warm spring day, she took a walk in the park, and when she came to a little stream, she was pleased to see Ned sitting on the bank, munching a sandwich and fishing. Hoping that he would invite her to join him, she walked by, but Ned just waved and said nothing.
When Nancy joined him, he did not object. Then she asked him, “Ned, why aren’t you like other guys who dress sharply and do things to attract girls’ attention?” Ned replied that two words governed his ways: Be yourself. Curious, she asked him to explain. Ned said he believed most guys and girls seemed to build prison cells for themselves, and the bars of those cells were what they strived to make others think of them. In other words, he explained, their focus is constantly on drawing attention to themselves, but his focus was not to draw attention to himself.
