Approval

'Practice makes you perfect' or some such thing, they say, and it is probably true. Whatever else I practiced or not, the one thing I know that I practiced with utmost diligence all through my life was this thing of seeking approval. It is true that I am yet to discover why it is so important to acquire this ability but still...
Anyway, I must say almost all of us get a very early start on this thing. One of my earliest memories must be that of visiting a neighborhood house and being offered candy, whereupon I was supposed to immediately look around to see if my mom approved of my taking it. If I fail to do so, OR grab a second or third helping without such approval, I was held up as an example for pigs to emulate in greed. (One of the eternal mysteries of Society for me is the fact that at an age when I could eat nonstop all day and still wake up in the night feeling hungry, I was expected to turn down additional offerings, if I expected social approval. On the other hand, now that I have hit an age, when I am already thinking about antacids halfway through the meal, people keep thrusting additional helpings on me and laud me if I eat everything on offer. Strange...but that is not the point of this discourse.)
What applies for early childhood, though, does not apply in the teens. Once you hit the teens, you start seeking approval of your peers AND a necessary (though not sufficient) condition is that you should earn the disapproval of the adult world at large but, most especially, your parents. It is thus that I could pity but not respect a friend when he met me with a disconsolate look.
"What is the point in enduring this queasy stomach and hangover, dude! My purpose was not served."
"What happened?"
"I reached home falling down drunk. My dad opened the door and had a satisfactorily disgusted look on his face."
"Good! So, why are you unhappy?"
"He asked me how much I had had to drink. I proudly said two large pegs of whisky. And do you know what he said?"
"What?"
"Only two large pegs and you are thoroughly sozzled? In my time I could down four and still walk a straight line."
Poor guy! You could say he earned his dad's disapproval, I suppose, but I quite agreed with him. THIS was not exactly the sort of disapproval for which he would earn brownie points with our friends. A knock-down-and-drag-on argument with his parents on his drinking ways and he could have become a hero.
Ah! Youth! Then you felt an almost messianic zeal about opposing almost anything the adult world said and rebelled against them. Mind you, you can keep spouting about freedom of thought and action but, unless you want to shed all your friends, NEVER apply the same freedom with regard to the thoughts and actions of your friends. So, there, I was already practicing to seek approval from people only to be liked, as opposed to the dependency factor that applied during earlier days with regard to parents.
This entire process of growing up - maturing, some wag called it and the term stuck - is, I think, a process of gaining more and more expertise at gaining approval. In the early days, it used to be just your parents; then just your own group of friends and, in both cases, there was roughly a unanimity in WHAT you were expected to do or be. Adult life is a process of finding out that all people around you do not, necessarily, approve of the same things. Your neighbors approve of your Nano but your in-laws sneer at it. Your boss wants you to come in formals, your wife prefers you to be hip. Your parents want you with them but your children prefer a gated community. So, you do a zig in the morning, a zag in the afternoon and go around in circles all night. The extent of your mastery at the art of gaining approvals determines how much stress and guilt you accrue in the process.
And here I am, near the end of life and free to do only things that I approve of, myself.
There is only one small hitch. Can someone please tell me exactly what I need to do to gain my  own approval?