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- The Capital Sins of Successđ
Losing perspective
The Strongest Poison ever known, came from Caesarâs Laurel Crown.
When Xerxes The Great, the Persian king best known for massive invasion of Greece, crossed the Hellespont durign his invasion, the water surged up all of a sudden and destroyed the bridges his engineers had spent days building.
His reaction to this whimsical act of nature?
He âhumblyâ requested his men to throw chains into the river and ordered them to be given 300 lashes as well as branded it with hot irons.
As his man delivered the âfairâ and ârationalâ punishment to the poor river, they were order to harangue it:
âYou salt and bitter stream, your master lays this punishment upon you for injuring him, who never injured you.â
Do bear in mind that he also ordered to cut off the heads of the men who had built the bridgesâŚ
It doesnât take a genius to know that Xerxesâ punishment was presumptuous to say the least, though I agree with Ryan Holiday, âpreposterous and delusionalâ are far more appropiate.
And it doesnât end there.
Before this events took place, Xerxes had written a letter to a nearby mountain (yes you read right, he wrote a letter to a fck!ng mountain) in which he needed to cut a canal. The letter said:
âYou may be tall and proud but donât you dare cause me any trouble. Otherwise, Iâll topple you into the sea.â
Unfortunately, this delusional threats and sense of importance arenât a historical anomally.
Ty Warner, American businessman and philantropist best known as the creator of Beanie Babies, ignored cautious objections from his team and bragged:
âI could put the Ty heart on manure and theyâd buy it.â
Only to fail catastrophically and destroy his own billion-dollar company as well as narrowly miss going to jail shortly after.
And if you listen to the Oval Office tapes from Richard Nixon, you can spot the same sickness.
EGOâŚ
The Cost of Success
One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that oneâs work is terribly important.
As Ryan Holiday puts it: With success come some of the greatest and most dangerous delusions: entitlement, control and paranoia
It is only after we fall prey to this delusions that we lose perspective of reality.
Itâs within the nature of success itself to throw us in this repetitive cycle of ego-feasting while it casts a spell over us deceiving us from what got us there in the first place.
Whatever form of success youâve managed to achieve, it required to take risks as well as an insane amount of effort.
Whether youâre an entrepreneur who created something out of nothing, or an athlete who proved his physical superiority or even a wealthy businessman who bet against the market and won.
All of them required courage and bravery.
Persistence and courage in the face of ridiculous odds are partially irrational traits. When it works, those tendencies can feel like theyâve been vindicated.
So it is only natural for us to fall prey of our own grandiosity as a mirror of the success we have achieved.
But how much of that success was truly our doing?
Do we really possess a magical power within us?
The Hot Hand Falacy
Don't let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn't go with it.
The true peril of success, itâs not the new dangers that may arise, but the person we believe ourselves to be because of it.
So says the Hot Hand Falacy.
When a basketball player is within a scoring streak âhotâ, people are more lileky to believe he will continue to do so on future attempts.
Thus, any person who experiences success with any random event, has the false belief that they have a greater chance of success in the near future.
And so we enter this endless cycle of doom.
If you do not cure yourself of this temper, it will end in insanity, oh which it is the symptomatic forerunner.
Entitlement is the result of the false belief that we are owed something, and once we succeed, the more we believe we deserve it.
As Ryan Holiday puts it:
âHe lives in a bubble in which no one can say no - not even his conscience.â
Such are the hazards of successâŚ
We should be careful into believing what weâre âowedâ and rather build a habit of regularly reminding ourselves of the limits of our power and reach.
And if you ever meet a person whoâs been engulfed by the perils of success, remember this short story.
There was once a famous letter wrote by General Winfield Scott to Jefferson Davis, the secretary of war for the USA at that time.
Being overrun by his ego and constant success, Davis was an egomaniac, to say the least, who regularly pestered General Scott on the most trivial matters.
Scott, being in full control of his emotions and self worth, ignored it until he fainlly chose to address it.
He claimed he pitied Davis, rather than hate him.
Compassion is always due, to an enraged imbecile, who lays about him in blow which hurt only himself.
So rememberâŚ
He who angers you, controls you