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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
Another great source for bargains includes the unlikely niche of stocks coming out of bankruptcy.
The Big Secret for the Small Investor
Joel Greenblatt
Whenever I offered any plan that would give the other teams a fighting chance against them, the Yankees always cried socialism, the first refuge of scoundrels. I say it is not socialism to tighten competition; I say it is capitalism at its best. The essence of capitalism is competition, and there is no competition when you are playing with a stacked deck. Weiss made his reputation by starting off so far ahead of the field every year that he almost had to break a leg to lose. The fallacy of this kind of “competition” is that it doesn’t really help the Yankees either. We are in a strange business; we are in competition and yet we are partners. Weak teams like Washington, Kansas City and Los Angeles are a drag on all of us.
Veeck--as in Wreck
Bill Veeck, Ed Linn
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