Self-limiting superiority

Introduction

After the denial of income race manifesto, I went on to observe and think about people’s behaviors and motives behind their hard working, pursuit, and everyday frustrations. I find the income race is a special case of a self limiting mindset: superiority based self-esteem. Under this mindset, one’s self esteem, pride, and even identity that is based on how better off they are compared with others.

In one discussion on the Internet about whether to relocate from country A to country B, the most upvoted post believed it’s a bad idea to move even the absolute income and living standard will be significantly higher in B. The reason is “your happiness depends on being far ahead of your friends and coworkers, where in A you have a big margin. In B, you will be unhappy because everyone is as happy as you!”

As you will see, the cost of this mindset is truly self-limiting. I believe it’s the root of many people’s suffering and depression.

From greatness to superiority

As illustrated in How to win friends and influence people, everyone is driven by the insatiable desire to be important. On top of that, we live in a world where everyone is judged by the systems all the time. From scores at school to ratings in performance reviews, it’s only natural to enjoy the feel from beating others.

Such feelings feed our ego and we become addictive. To get more of it, we artificially create more competitions. Whose house is most expensive, who just got promoted to a high level, whose income is highest, who managed to F.I.R.E, whose child went to the best school, who just bought the most expensive whatever, who has more likes from social media. I heard there are people tie smartphones to their dogs so that they will rank high in a steps tracking app!

After years of competing, winning, and feeling important from being superior, the pursuit of superiority becomes a habit, then an instinct. Superiority supersedes greatness as our sole priority, because it’s easier to achieve and more accessible than true greatness. Hence our lives are handicapped by this mindset unknowingly. Below are how it makes a beautiful life miserable and pathetic.

The dilemma of failures and efforts

If we base our greatness on superiority and we are superior when we beat others, what are we when we lose?

When I was brought up, it’s like an arm race on exam scores. Parents do whatever possible to get their kids to top schools and pay for after school classes so that they can do better at exams. My parents can’t afford any of those, but I later found it benefited my performance. I found myself way more motivated at learning than my friends who attended ‘better’ schools. It’s because in their schools, competition is much more intense than mine given all students came from highly motivated families. It’s harder for them to win! So under the superiority mindset, they are all demotivated by the frustration from not being able to beat others.

During college, I’ve had an interesting but sad observation when working as the teaching assistant in an entry level programming class for sophomore computer science students. Some students get to this top university by winning in IOI or similar experience, others have zero exposure to computer programming before. So their gap was huge in the beginning. While all of them were at least top 0.1% best in their school life before that, those without IOI experience find they need to spend hours on problems that others can solve in less than one minute. Thus many of them were strongly demotivated to learn and saw themselves hopeless to be superior again. Many even chose to change their major from computer science.

The same happened to me. I first chose Architecture as my major in college, but was devastated by the fact that I’m the least ‘gifted’ in painting among the class. While the truth is that I have zero experience while others all have previous training(remember, my parents can’t afford such learning outside school), I was so dominated by the fear of never being superior again that I chose to change to a major where my ‘talent’ in math can help me beat others. By prioritizing the chance of being superior, I deprived myself the opportunity to explore my life as an architect.

Superiority driven people have to protect their ego when facing failures, especially when reaching a meaningful goal means a long learning process involving constant negative feedback, a.k.a not being superior. Finding ways to improve and change for the better is the correct strategy, but this becomes very hard if our perspective focuses on the winning or losing, rather than growing. Instead, most such people protect themselves by believing one of the following:

• The system is rigged against them(unfairness, racism, bad luck, etc)
• Life, at least the current endeavor is hopeless and I must find a new game
• I am unworthy and can never be great, so I will stop trying. After all, failures after hard work will make me even less superior than failures without.

The dilemma of success and accomplishment

It turns out success and accomplishment will be equally harmful for superiority driven people, even though they won’t hurt their egos. Successes fuel their ego and the toxic component of their belief system: I’m special, superior and entitled.

How do entitled people behave in life? Arrogant, cold, uncollaborative. Arrogant and cold are among the most harmful traits I can think of. Such people are truly predestined to fail. It will be very hard for them to make true friends and allies. The only possibility is when they meet like minded people and have comparable overall superiority. But they had better not share a common domain so that they don’t need to compete against each other. As a principle: people without a strong network will lead a very tough life.

I’ve been one of such victims for my entire 20s. I mostly did well in schools and entry level jobs. Partly because I’ve the tendency to pick challenges that can prove my superiority, partly because I’ve strong motive to maintain my image, largely to my ego, that I’m superior, so I worked very hard. Those successes made me feel entitled and become arrogant. I don’t want to befriend anyone not in my ‘class’ and expect everyone to admire me. At work and in life, I put my agenda over the benefit of anyone else, even my families and friends: how to look most competent, how to build my advantages over others, how to grow the skills I care to grow. I became a Machiavellian unconsciously. I honestly attest that such a work style is doomed to failure or mediocre results at best in the long run. (See this post about how my work style was forced to evolve during the past years.)

The curse from pursuing superiority: selfishness

In the long run, both success or failure will worsen our lives under the superiority driven mindset. Failures hurt our ego and make us demotivated, successes make us arrogant which hurt our connections with others. Looking one level deeper, I think the reason superiority mindset is doomed to failure is because it’s anti-collaboration and selfish.

From my self reflection at how to be with other people, I find otherish is the best attitude towards life. It might be even philosophically optimal because

• Otherish is deduced as the optimal strategy from a selfish stand point(see the linked post)
• This attitude makes my life and work tremendously easier by objective measures. It also made a huge difference for my emotion
• Many other ideologies, including most religions, all advocate altruistic behaviors in their core values

Otherish is by definition contradictory to superiority. Thus when pursuing superiority, we are not able to adopt an otherish attitude, which makes most achievements very hard. This is the fundamental pitfall of superiority based esteem in my mind.

Everything is a judgement

A friend with a similar family background like mine once said: ‘I still see everything as an exam’. It doesn’t take a psychologist to know, we usually don’t perform well when we think we are being judged. Thus it’s a huge disadvantage to think everything as if it’s a judgement in some way.

But it’s hard not to, under the superiority mindset, isn’t it? We go levels.fyi to compare our salaries with others, we avoid friends who just got a big promotion or made a fortune, we see every people interaction as an opportunity to show off how awesome we are(Instagram has become the live proof of this).

I committed more than my fair share of guilt. One example is at meetings or any forms of in person discussion. For a very long time, I see meetings as opportunities to impress my peers and bosses. Whenever an idea occurred to me that I thought worthy of speaking up, I would concentrate on organizing my speech and largely ignore what others were saying. Such is handicapped perception towards meetings because

• It made me a bad listener, the then speaker would sense my distraction which seriously hurt his feelings
• It prevented me from getting the most information and learnings from the meeting
• My idea, when it’s brilliant, could make others look awkward. Then it’s wrong to express in the meeting environment

In Clubhouse, I find many people are like my past self. Their intention of speaking is to make them sound smart and knowledgeable, they become defensive the moment anyone expresses slight disagreement.

The fixed and closed mindset

Carol S. Dweck in the bestseller Mindset believed that a fixed mindset gives birth to superiority driven behaviors. I think the opposite is more likely: ego gives birth to superiority based esteem, which leads to a fixed and closed mindset. It’s because superiority is based on comparing one against another. In order to be meaningfully compared, the people must be static for an extended period. This means change won’t happen easily or ever at all, which naturally leads to a fixed mindset.

As Carol discovered, people under fixed mindsets behave very differently than those under growth mindsets.

I hope it’s clear that under a fixed mindset, one is literally crippled and logically very hard to be successful. The mechanism has a similar structure as the success/failure dilemmas in last sections.

There are discussions about prioritization between performance and growth at work. I always think there’s a hidden relation between them: growth drives the long term performance. Short term performance is more determined by randomness. Thus growth is a more meaningful priority for a team in most cases. It’s hard to realize this under the superiority focus mindset.

Escaping from it

I finally escaped from this self limiting mindset by realizing otherish is my best interaction style. Of course, this can’t be indoctrinated. I think everyone influenced by it will need to have their own way out. Below are some I can think of:

• Devotion to a great ideology and its missions that’s much bigger than any individuals. Our ego will then be dwarfed, so is the urge to be superior
• Deeply understand your religion(if you have one), know the values it stands for behind the daily rituals
• Realizing to be superior by those objective metrics, being faithfully otherish is the only most efficient way, which contradicts the pursuit of superiority. Also enjoy the gratification from helping others. If you are like me, you will find the gratification from helping others trumps the esteem from being superior
• Stay open minded, explore and experience this life. You may eventually get tired of the everlasting competitions and learn to really live your life.

Jade gamblers and farmers, a metaphor

Let me end this post with an interesting story concerning jade.

Jade gambing is a speculation activity started from Myanmar. The value of raw jade stones just mined are fixed but not known until the stone is fully cut off. In jade gambling, the seller sells raw stones with various levels of cuts. The more cuts a stone has, the easier it is to know the true value. Any cut will only change the buyers’ valuation on the stone, but not the intrinsic value itself. One cut though, may sway the price of the stone by 100 times, in either direction.

Many people’s lives are crippled because they see their lives as a jade stone to be valued. Everything happened is interpreted as a cut on the stone, from which others know more about the stone’s deterministic value. With a good cut, they will feel respected but secretly worry that their stone is not as precious as it seems. With a bad cut, it’s a big blow because it may be indeed worthless as they worried about.

Farmers don’t adopt this perspective in their profession. They work hard every year and harvest the results. Whatever the earth produced, they accept it and more importantly, try to learn from the experience. They will be frustrated by a bad year, but they will never believe next year will be the same because of it or stop trying harder. It’s equally ridiculous to feel superior from last year’s harvest, because it’s all in the past and the future is unknown(able). They improve their techniques little by little. After thousands of years, their learning resulted in modern agriculture today.