Self-Awareness

When I think about my biggest mistakes, they all seem to share one theme: I let my ego get the best of me. Staying humble is easier said than done, and it’s hard to appreciate how good things are until they’re gone. There’s a fine line between keeping your ego in check and sacrificing so much self-respect that you become a doormat. In most cases, you don’t realize you’ve crossed that line until it’s too late.

Sometimes we do things because we want to, sometimes we do things because we must. For example, you may need to do a task at work that you don’t particularly enjoy, but you do it because it’s part of your job. Or perhaps you listen to a song you enjoy because you enjoy the song. Simple enough, right?

When it comes to people who are insanely successful, in the vast majority of cases their success comes from a combination of 2 things: rich parents and luck. When I say “rich parents”, I generally mean relatively rich parents. It doesn’t matter how genius you are if you grow up poor with no opportunities, you won’t get far in life because the world is not a meritocracy.

There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Few have mastered the art of walking it, and fewer still have the wisdom to know when to step back. People with enough self awareness to recognize their infallibility are–in my experience–a rare breed. I think a lot of the self-help advice about how we should love ourselves and be confident and yadda yadda tends to be correct on the surface, but in practice it gets deployed incorrectly. Confidence is great, but ignorance combined with too much confidence leads to arrogance.