confidence game. Make it so you don’t have to fake it—that’s the key. Can
you imagine a doctor trying to get by with anything less? Or a quarterback, or
a bull rider? More to the point, would you want them to? So why would you
try otherwise?
Every time you sit down to work, remind yourself: I am delaying
gratification by doing this. I am passing the marshmallow test. I am earning
what my ambition burns for. I am making an investment in myself instead of
in my ego. Give yourself a little credit for this choice, but not so much,
because you’ve got to get back to the task at hand: practicing, working,
improving.
Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept
everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first
drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits others are getting, and
more importantly,
ignoring whatever plaudits you may be getting. Because
there is work to be done. Work doesn’t
want to be good. It is made so,
despite the headwind.
There is another old expression: You know a workman by the chips they
leave. It’s true. To judge your progress properly, just take a look at the floor.
W
FOR EVERYTHING THAT COMES NEXT, EGO IS THE
ENEMY . . .
’Tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder.
—SHAKESPEARE
e know where we want to end up: success. We want to matter. Wealth
and recognition and reputation are nice too. We want it all.
The problem is that we’re not sure that humility can get us there. We are
petrified, as the Reverend Dr. Sam Wells put it,
that if we are humble, we
will end up “subjugated, trodden on, embarrassed and irrelevant.”
Midway through his career, if you’d asked our model Sherman how he
felt, he probably would have described himself in almost exactly those terms.
He had not made much money. He had won no great battles. He had not seen
his name in lights or headlines. He might have, at that moment, before the
Civil War, begun to question the path he’d chosen, and whether those who
follow it finished last.
This is the thinking that creates the Faustian bargain that turns most clean
ambition into shameless addiction.
In the early stages, ego can be temporarily
adaptive. Craziness can pass for audaciousness. Delusions can pass for
confidence, ignorance for courage. But it’s just kicking the costs down the
road.
Because no one ever said, reflecting on the whole of someone’s life,
“Man, that monstrous ego sure was worth it.”
The internal debate about confidence calls to mind a well-known concept
from the radio pioneer Ira Glass, which could be called the Taste/Talent
Gap.
All of us who do creative work . . . we get into it because we have
good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that
you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good . . . It’s really
not that great. It’s
trying to be good,
it has ambition to be good, but it’s
not quite that good. But your taste—the thing that got you into the game
—your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can
tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.
It is in precisely this gap that ego can seem comforting. Who wants to look
at themselves and their work and find that it does not measure up? And so
here we might bluster our way through. Cover up hard truths with sheer force
of personality and drive and passion.
Or, we can face our shortcomings
honestly and put the time in. We can let this humble us, see clearly where we
are talented
and where we need to improve, and then put in the work to
bridge that gap. And we can set upon positive habits that will last a lifetime.
If ego was tempting in Sherman’s time, in this era, we are like Lance
Armstrong training for the 1999 Tour de France. We are Barry Bonds
debating whether to walk into the BALCO clinic. We flirt with arrogance and
deceit, and in the process grossly overstate the importance of winning at all
costs. Everyone is juicing,
the ego says to us, you should too.
There’s no way
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