Me, Myself and Moi
I remember this story that a software engineer once told me. He told me about how hard he worked on a project, which he wanted his boss to approve of. When he demonstrated it to his boss, the software displayed the boss's photograph. The guy believes this was the single most important reason why his boss approved the project.
I think it is important to acknowledge all the sources which boosts your ego. It is important to accept the weak ones too. They may be as trivial as seeing one's own face, or hearing one's own name, or as significant as winning the Nobel prize. The tricky ones remind you of yourself in subtle ways. Stuff that seem to agree with your own beliefs (esp. the ones you are not vocal about, atleast in the given context), are subtle yet powerful.
Once they are identified, we tend to go through a range of emotions. [Oh my god, am I soo shallow that I get a kick from hearing that I know of one band more than the other guy? No *I* don't take pride in such trivial things. No. Never]. As far as I am concerned, acknowledging them is very important. You may be comfortable to live with some of them, while others may clash with your own morality. At this point, you could re-evaluate either your own sense of morality, or the things that you actually value, or both. Maybe you could reconcile them.
If you fail to acknowledge them, you make it difficult to evaluate the sources objectively. Hey, I feel good right now, my picture is definitely not the reason behind it, so it must the software! Acknowledging those little boosts help us to decouple them from the rest of the system. Hmm, that is a photograph of myself, cool! Now where was I with evaluating the software? Denying these little kicks is what makes us susceptible to flattery, and poor judgement. Accepting them on the other hand, makes you realize how ordinary you are. Which is ofcourse a topic for later!
I think it is important to acknowledge all the sources which boosts your ego. It is important to accept the weak ones too. They may be as trivial as seeing one's own face, or hearing one's own name, or as significant as winning the Nobel prize. The tricky ones remind you of yourself in subtle ways. Stuff that seem to agree with your own beliefs (esp. the ones you are not vocal about, atleast in the given context), are subtle yet powerful.
Once they are identified, we tend to go through a range of emotions. [Oh my god, am I soo shallow that I get a kick from hearing that I know of one band more than the other guy? No *I* don't take pride in such trivial things. No. Never]. As far as I am concerned, acknowledging them is very important. You may be comfortable to live with some of them, while others may clash with your own morality. At this point, you could re-evaluate either your own sense of morality, or the things that you actually value, or both. Maybe you could reconcile them.
If you fail to acknowledge them, you make it difficult to evaluate the sources objectively. Hey, I feel good right now, my picture is definitely not the reason behind it, so it must the software! Acknowledging those little boosts help us to decouple them from the rest of the system. Hmm, that is a photograph of myself, cool! Now where was I with evaluating the software? Denying these little kicks is what makes us susceptible to flattery, and poor judgement. Accepting them on the other hand, makes you realize how ordinary you are. Which is ofcourse a topic for later!
posted by Balachandran C at 9:26 AM
1 Comments:
Well how I take it is a little more simplistically. I accept that I have an ego. Yes also that it can be flattered. I just enjoy the flatterry to a certain extent and reminds the one who flatters that what he says might be entirely wrong also. Its like accepting a paradox, ie its a necessary evil.
Why I say its a necessary evil is because we view ourselves as what we think of ourselves and in certain respects how others think we are. So its like a fogged mirror. Where how you view yourself is based on the image formed on that mirror.
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