The Paradox of Self-Esteem
How positive thinking ends up hindering our own development.
On the night before my first day of school, my father gave me some valuable advice. “School is simple,” he said. “All you have to do is listen carefully to everything your teachers say. Whenever you don’t understand something, you raise your hand and ask your question until everything is perfectly clear. Promise yourself every day that you will not go home until you understand everything. Follow this method and you’ll see: you won’t even need to study.
My dad definitely knew how to deal with the lazy kid in me. “Wait, you don’t even have to study?” I said to myself. I can spend my free time playing GTA?!” Besides, at just seven years old, if our dad says something, it must be the absolute truth, right? And so, I took his advice at face value. And I did so for years to come.
During my adolescence, this attitude turned into skepticism. I developed the habit of doubting whatever I was told. Without even meaning to, my brain started to consistently pick holes in what people around me and my teachers were saying.
I rarely agreed with people, including myself. As soon as I was persuaded by an idea, I immediately became suspicious of it, and started looking for its flaws for the mere pleasure of debate.
This contrarian habit earned me some tense relationships with my family and friends, or sometimes the feeling of being an unbearable jerk in public. And yet, I decided to keep on cultivating it because it was very beneficial to me. Think about it: only extremely robust arguments persist in the face of such relentlessness. By challenging the ideas I was presented with, I was able to retain only the best.
Like a sculptor who works his block of marble down to the last detail, I think it is necessary to carve an idea from all its angles before believing it. Otherwise, we base our beliefs on distorted blocks, until one day they all fall apart. I was building a solid block of knowledge that would become very useful later on. Little by little, certainly, but without leaving anything to chance.
“You don’t need a brain to agree. All you need is a spinal cord.” — Didier Raoult, French physician
However, I realized that the older I got, the more this attitude seemed to bother my classmates, and in some cases, my teachers. The more time passed, the more the question burned in me: if my attitude was so beneficial, why did it bother them?
Because no one likes to have their ignorance exposed.
The Paradox of Self-Esteem
My mother grew up in a relatively modest family in a small village in northern Portugal. As a child, she had to take care of her five younger brothers, which forced her to leave school early. “I never asked questions in class,” she told me. “I don’t like to ask questions. In fact, I feel like other people understand everything, and I’m afraid to look like an idiot. I don’t want to bother other people. I don’t want them to think I’m dumb.”
Bingo.
As a result of this realization, I began to notice some revealing behaviors. Oddly enough, the colleagues who teased me were the same ones who came to ask me questions before the exam. During class time, I would even have a classmate request that I ask the professor a question for him. “Why don’t you do it yourself?” I would reply. “Come on, please, we’re used to you,” he would respond with a nervous laugh.
When you think about it, it’s obvious: to ask a question is at best to admit that you don’t understand, and at worst to face your own ignorance. To contradict an authority (here: the teacher) is to risk being publicly confronted.
If our self-esteem is the most important thing for us, what is the point of speaking up? If what matters most is what we think we are, not what we really are, then why take the risk?
Precisely to become less ignorant.
This is what I call the paradox of self-esteem. In all areas of our lives, we face the following dilemma:
- Refuse our ignorance and stagnate.
- Accept our ignorance and grow.
In any case, we are ignorant. But we have a choice between stagnating while looking smart, or progressing while looking dumb. No matter what we do, we cannot avoid this dilemma, because only situations that expose our ignorance allow us to free ourselves from it.
Popular wisdom suggests that children learn so quickly because their brains are much more flexible than those of adults. But what about the following idea:
More than physiological characteristics, the biggest difference between a child and an adult is their respective attitudes towards their own ignorance. While childish stupidity is tolerated, even encouraged for its cuteness, adult stupidity is generally despised, even humiliated.
For this reason, the child laughs at his mistakes, while the adult avoids making them. The child develops his knowledge and skills, while the adult remains paralyzed by his fear.
To motivate their students to participate in class, professors often convey the principle that “there is no such thing as a dumb question.” What if we did the exact opposite? What if we admitted once and for all that there are only dumb questions? That it is precisely the essence of a question, to be dumb?
The whole point of a question is that it articulates our ignorance in an attempt to become less stupid. What if we finally gave up our denial of ignorance? Once and for all, let’s proudly affirm it: we are all stupid, and that’s fine.
Toxic Positivity
By following my father’s advice, I achieved brilliant results throughout my education, all the way to college. But ironically, as a young adult, I ended up falling into the trap of self-esteem.
I was told so often how smart I was that I ended up believing it myself. In other words, I end up taking path number 1. of the dilemma (denying my own ignorance), after having lived my entire adolescence following path number 2 (accepting my own ignorance).
“Excellent!” a believer in positive thinking would say. But beyond the obvious narcissism promoted by this school of thought, thinking of myself in positive terms was actually becoming a heavy obstacle to my personal development. I was losing my patience after my second guitar lesson. I would get upset every time I was faced with food that I didn’t know how to cook.
While I perceived myself as exceptionally good, this toxic positivity made me anxious about the very situations that were essential to my development. To understand this phenomenon, there is nothing quite like the famous phrase from the Letter to the Corinthians in the New Testament:
“And if Christ has not been raised, then our faith is in vain.” — St. Paul of Tarsus, Apostle of Jesus
In other words, to acknowledge that Jesus Christ did not rise would mean that the Christian faith leads to nothing, and by extension, that being Christian means nothing. For this reason, a Christian has every interest in protecting the myth of the resurrection, otherwise all his sacrifices would be worthless.
In the same way, whether it is legitimate or not, good or bad, we do our best to protect our identity because it gives meaning to our lives. It justifies our existence, all the more so when the efforts we have devoted in its name are important.
Since my personal identity revolved around my supposed intelligence, I began to avoid all situations that reminded me how ignorant I could be. In order to preserve my identity, I ran away from anything that threatened my self-perception.
Thus, the paradox of self-esteem applied: I remained a terrible guitarist, and even my cat didn’t want my cuisine. In fact, this toxic positivity was making me more and more fragile. More and more vulnerable to situations that challenged my identity.
By refusing to acknowledge my own ignorance, I was condemning myself to remain a prisoner of it.
When self-love turns into toxic positivity, it leads us into a vicious circle that, like a straitjacket, paralyzes us into an immutable identity.
When a habit produces undesirable results, it may be wise to look at its perfect opposite. In a world where the obsession with self-love constantly pushes us to feed our identity, what could be more appetizing than to completely abandon it?
Perhaps the way out lies in the antithesis of self-love: humility.
The Talking Monkey
Where self-love pretends to know, humility asks a question. While self-love pushes us to protect our identity, humility crushes it.
By accepting to walk with our own ignorance, humility empowers us to move forward in the presence of the unknown. Self-love, on the other hand, only steps into known territory for fear of encountering our ignorance.
This is why self-love locks us into ourselves, while humility opens us to the world. If the former was a cowering old man, the latter would be a growing child. Self-love shrinks us, while humility helps us grow.
Without a doubt, humility is one of the most admired virtues. Great inventors, entrepreneurs, athletes and artists share this trait that is so hard to define.
Ask a passerby to do so and he or she will probably answer something like the ability to be great while believing oneself to be small.
This conception of humility has never satisfied me. For years I associated humility with a form of hypocrisy. I felt that it was a trick to gain sympathy from others. Not only did these people want to be admired for their competence, but also for their supposed simplicity.
Ironically, humility sounded to me like the pinnacle of pride, until I learned what it was really all about.
“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.” — Rick Warren
As opposed to what positive thinking teaches us, humility encourages us to think less of ourselves. It reminds us that what matters is not what we think we are, but what we really are.
The great ones of this world do not earn our admiration for what they think they are, but for what they strive to become. Although their humility is a moral virtue in our eyes, it is far more useful to them than just that. Before they are humble for others, they are first of all humble for themselves.
By reducing the power of their identity, they become infinitely less vulnerable to situations that reveal their ignorance. By being aware of their own limitations, they constantly offer themselves the opportunity to grow. Their humility is the key to their confidence, for by welcoming the possibility of being wrong, it allows them to move forward in the presence of uncertainty.
It is for this reason that the great are humble. Or rather: it is because they are humble that they become great.
For more than a decade, the self-help industry has been inviting you to think of yourself in positive terms, so as to build a sense of self-esteem that would allow you to gain confidence.
By following this paradigm, you have built an identity that is disconnected from reality and therefore very vulnerable to situations that challenge it. You are therefore forced to avoid them in order to protect your sense of self. Paradoxically, by avoiding these situations necessary to your development, you remain in mediocrity.
From now on, I encourage you to think less about yourself. If you are going to make a judgment about yourself, just think of yourself as a talking monkey, because that is what you truly are.
In doing so, you will free yourself from the weight that your identity has been placing on you. By accepting your ignorance, you will stop being afraid of it. By embracing humility, you will stop believing and start becoming.
From now on, let’s just all be dumb, and let’s be proud of it.
