Being Yourself Can Transform Your Life #031

Hello and welcome back to Every Dawn, where I try to give you one thought for your day every workday. I was recently looking through the Dao, and we talked about it yesterday. So, if you want, you can go back and have a look. I found another interesting take about everyday life in the Dao, the Chinese book of wisdom, also called the Dao De Jing, the Book of the Way and Virtue.

It says in Chapter 22:

"Therefore, the sage, the wise man, holds in his embrace the one thing of humility and manifests it in all the world. He is free from self-display, and therefore he shines; free from self-assertion, and therefore he is distinguished; free from self-boasting, and therefore his merit is acknowledged; free from self-complacency, and therefore he acquires superiority. It is because he is thus free from striving that no one in the world is able to strive with him."

Now, this goes very much against what our society normally advertises, right? Where you have to strive, promote yourself, show off your qualities, impress others, and be better than others. You should not only really be better but also show that you are better. You should not be humble; you should display your qualities as much as possible. You should write personal statements and your CV as if you were the best thing since the discovery of sliced bread. You should make sure that everybody knows that you are the big thing.

But it is interesting that the advice here goes quite the other way, and I think it's plausible what it says. We do have an instinctive dislike of self-advertisement. We smell it when it happens, and it smells bad. When you have somebody who is boasting about themselves, trying to sell themselves as the most important or best person in the room, or the biggest expert, we suspect immediately that there is some kind of cheating going on. This self-marketing is something that we don't like and are suspicious of.

When do we accept someone as an authority? When do we really like someone? When do we really accept that they are actually great? It is when they don't advertise themselves. When their advertisement comes from another source, when somebody else says something good about them, but not the person themselves. Then we perceive them as genuine, and we think that they are actually valuable.

So perhaps we should try to do this more. Not as a trick, because this also doesn't work. You cannot, as a trick, try to show yourself to be humble in order for others to believe that you are better than you say. This also smells right.

But we should genuinely just be more human, be less focused on selling ourselves by blowing up our achievements. Especially, this is what beginners do, right? When you compare, for example, a beginner in a job who writes his first CV, his first application, these are always full of exaggerations and blowing up the smallest achievements to epic proportions to make it look like they have a lot of experience or have done this and that great things.

When I read this, because sometimes I have to read student applications, it immediately puts me off. While when you see an application, let's say, of a really distinguished person for some job, they will just state their name and say, "I'm this person. I apply for this job. That's it. I've written a few things here and there. That's me." And then you know, wow, here is a person who has real value, and they know about it and are conscious of their value. This is why they're not afraid; they don't need to produce this impression, this air of fluff, but they can just be who they are, and they're good enough and confident.

So, perhaps when we go about it in our everyday life, we should be more like the Dao says, confident that we are good enough as we are. We don't need to boast, and we don't need to blow up our achievements. Boasting and blowing these things up would only make us suspect.

While being honest and saying, "Okay, that's me with my faults and whatever I have done. If you want me, take me, and if not, I will live my life happily somewhere else with someone else," it's the same, actually, also with dating. In dating, it's also a big thing that people are always blowing up their self-descriptions and their pictures and doing all kinds of manipulations on Instagram to appear bigger than they are, and nobody really buys this.

Sometimes you have people who are just confident doing what they like, and these are actually the most popular people. These are the people whom everybody wants to be with because this is what shines: your confidence. If you don't need to blow it up in this way, let's see today how we can be more honest, perhaps in a small way, in a letter, in an email, in a job application, when we apply for something, or when we present ourselves to others, perhaps in a dating app.

Let's try to see how we can be a little more honest, a little more humble, and a little more personal and authentic, and reach this stage like the Dao says, where the person who is free from striving, therefore no one in the world is able to strive with him, which means to overtake them because they are not striving, they're not participating in this game, and so they can be confident, they can be happy, and they can be whole.

Thank you, and see you next time. Bye-bye.