Dwight Howard said his indecision on whether or not he would stay with Orlando was the result of trying to keep everybody happy.

"That's one of the lessons that I learned, you know. I can't make everybody happy," Howard told Ric Bucher during ESPN’s "Sunday Conversation."

"And it was a tug of war between my feelings and the fans and everybody else and their feelings and what happened to LeBron. And I saw him -- everybody hated him for leaving Cleveland and what he did," Howard said of LeBron James' free-agent move from the Cavaliers to the Heat in 2010. "I never wanted anybody to hate me, you know. I wanted everybody to love me, you know, like me, for sticking around and doing what they wanted me to do. And making everybody else happy. And that was a valuable lesson for me, you know.

"I can't make everybody happy."

Howard acknowledged his previous desire to be traded to the Nets.

"That was a team I wanted to go to," Howard said. "I felt like I could go there and write my own history. I was worried about what people would think, you know. 'If you go to L.A. everybody's going to say you're like Shaq. Everybody's going to say this about you.' And now I'm at the point where, so what, who cares what people say. This is my destiny, this is where I want to be, this is what I want to do with my life. I can’t worry about what everybody else is saying."