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We tend to be on guard against negativity, against the people who are discouraging us from pursuing our callings or doubting the visions we have for ourselves. This is certainly an obstacle to beware of, though dealing with it is rather simple. What we cultivate less is how to protect ourselves against the validation and gratification that will quickly come our way if we show promise. What we don’t protect ourselves against are people and things that make us feel good—or rather, too good. We must prepare for pride and kill it early—or it will kill what we aspire to. We must be on guard against that wild self-confidence and self-obsession. “The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor once said. This is how we fight the ego, by really knowing ourselves. The question to ask, when you feel pride, then, is this: What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see? What am I avoiding, or running from, with my bluster, franticness, and embellishments? It is far better to ask and answer these questions now, with the stakes still low, than it will be later. It’s worth saying: just because you are quiet doesn’t mean that you are without pride. Privately thinking you’re better than others is still pride. It’s still dangerous. “That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin,” Montaigne had inscribed on the beam of his ceiling. It’s a quote from the playwright Menander, and it ends with “you who think yourself to be someone.” We are still striving, and it is the strivers who should be our peers—not the proud and the accomplished. Without this understanding, pride takes our self-conception and puts it at odds with the reality of our station, which is that we still have so far to go, that there is still so much to be done.
Ego Is the Enemy
Ryan Holiday
routinely outweigh their benefits, and often there’s no benefit at all, just pain with no gain. Since neurons that fire together wire together, staying with a negative experience past the point that’s useful is like running laps in Hell: You dig the track a little deeper in your brain each time you go around it. On the other hand, positive experiences always have gain and rarely have pain. They usually feel good in the moment. Additionally, the most direct way to grow inner strengths such as determination, a sense of perspective, positive emotions, and compassion is to have experiences of them in the first place. If you want to develop more gratitude, keep resting your mind on feeling thankful. If you want to feel more loved, look for and stay with experiences in which you feel included, seen, appreciated, liked, or cherished. The answer to the question of how to grow good things inside your mind is this: Take in experiences of them.
Hardwiring Happiness
Rick Hanson
Germany had not planned on the need to hold out for long and upon entering the war had a stockpile of nitrates for making gunpowder sufficient for six months and no more. Only the later discovery of a method for fixing nitrogen out of the air enabled her war effort to continue. The French, gambling on a quick finish, risked no troops on what would have been a difficult defense of the Lorraine iron basin but allowed the Germans to take it on the theory that they would regain it with victory. As a result they lost 80 per cent of their iron ore for the duration and almost lost the war.
The Guns of August
Barbara W. Tuchman and Robert K. Massie
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