The pride of getting real

To have a good reputation is to be held in high esteem by others. When someone has a good reputation, people look at him and believe he is worthy of entertaining a relationship.

A professional with a good reputation is better positioned to attract and pursue new business opportunities.

A person with a good reputation among others is better positioned to form new friendships and enter new social circles.

A chef with a good reputation can have people sit at his table and eat his food without needing them to try it first.

A teacher with a good reputation may have a new class of students willing to listen to him, even though they’ve never heard him speak.

Reputation is a valuable asset. It broadens one’s horizons and makes it easier for reputable individuals to exchange values with others.

To work on one’s reputation is to persuade others that one is good.

But people who seek a good reputation often forget that true persuasiveness in this realm comes from effectiveness in action, not by bragging or showing what one is not. The effective action creates the necessary evidence that proves one’s worth.

When someone is effective in action, he obtained confidence in himself; he acquired self-esteem. A person with self-esteem knows he is good—he has convinced himself of this through the success of his own actions.

When someone has self-esteem, he becomes bolder. He tries things that have never been tried before, and he does so with confidence. He becomes unique. He separates himself from being someone who is merely repeating successful recipes to live. The acquisition of self-esteem by effective action creates a virtuous cycle of life getting better and better for that person.

To acquire self-esteem, one must act with pride. One must believe he can—and should—be better. A person with pride acts to improve himself.

People often confuse pride with arrogance. That is a serious mistake. Pride is precisely what arrogance is not. Arrogance is pretending or believing one is better than he truly is. It leads to stagnation, unpreparedness, failure, and insecurity. The arrogant person builds a façade to protect a reputation he hasn’t earned. The arrogant brags and humiliate others so he reaches a superior level that he did not earn.

Another mistake is to address the issue of arrogance with humility. A humble person behaves in ways that make him appear—or even become—less than he is. Humility is self-sabotage. It is to diminish one’s worth for others, and more importantly, for oneself. Humility not only makes one have lower reputation with others than the reputation truly deserved - but more importantly, it makes the humble less confident in himself. Humility ends up depriving him from values that could and should be pursued in order to have a better life.

One does not need humility to avoid arrogance. One needs to be proud, and therefore real. One must know where he stands on the scale of worthiness, so he knows what he needs to do to be better. The only way to avoid arrogance is to be objective and rational—to align oneself with a reality independent of his wishes, and to do so rightly. Avoiding arrogance is a subproduct of pursuing a higher goal: happiness. The ability to say to oneself that one’s life is good, and simply believe in it.

To be real, one must know his place in the world. If he wants a better place, he must act to earn it. Once earned, he can enjoy the reputation that follows. But the most important reputation is the one held by the image reflected in the mirror. The man who fights for his self-esteem knows his life is not built on others’ opinions—it is built on his own actions and judgment of himself.

To focus only on external reputation is to live a life of pretending. It is to wear a mask. And that is not a life worth living, because true happiness is not achieved this way. Pretending leads to the anxiety of covering one’s true self, not happiness.

Arrogance is a vice. One needs not to pretend to be better than he is. If he does, he becomes not only unprepared but also unconvincing.

Humility is a vice. One does not need to sabotage one’s reputation to prove he is not arrogant. If one is humble, one undermines not only his self-worth and confidence but also his hard-earned reputation.

Pride is a human virtue. It is not a vice. Arrogant and humble people alike lack pride. Neither is striving to be real and better.

Pride is, among more essential things, a recognition that life is not a masquerade ball.