You are not special. WE are special.
But lately, I feel WE are divided.
As I read the news, check social media, and talk to friends the gap between “us” and “them” seems to grow. Yet, most of us believe we’re not part of either group. We think we are on the outside looking in, but I think we’re wrong.
All of us are part of the problem…I am part of the problem.
The seeds of division hide deep inside of us.
I spent the first three decades of my life believing I was special. I was 30 years old when I saw my true self for the first time, and I was shocked. Failure opened my eyes.
I failed in a big public way that couldn’t be easily hidden or disguised. I had an idea, I built a team, we raised money from investors, and we worked like crazy to turn our vision into reality, but we failed. We ran out of money, shut down the business, and I stood there looking at myself in the mirror and seeing deep inside myself for the first time.
I knew the odds. I knew 90% of startups fail, so I wasn’t surprised we failed. However, hidden inside of me was a feeling I was finally forced to acknowledge. I had not consciously chosen to feel this way. It was a feeling that had managed to disguise itself inside of me for many years, but it no longer had anywhere to hide…
I felt my failure wasn’t fair.
Fair?! What does that even mean? Who said anything in life would ever be fair? I sure didn’t! Yet, there it was, and I felt it. I wanted fairness! I wanted something or someone else to make things right. I felt I deserved it, or maybe, I was even owed it. And this is where the real danger comes from. When you think YOU are special, you believe the universe is on your side and things will go your way. When life doesn’t go your way, you feel YOU were wronged. You feel entitled, you start to feel sorry for yourself, and you do nothing. You don’t get to work learning from your failures and moving forward. You just sit there waiting for someone else to fix it, to give you what you deserve, to be fair.
Guess what? Life’s not fair. Yes, it is cliche, but profound. Life is not fair, you are not special, and neither am I.
Why do you believe you are special?
It is something we are taught. We aren’t born with a feeling of entitlement, and not everyone learns to believe they are special. But for children born into comfort, security, prosperity, and loving families, one of the first lessons we learn is that we are special. We get what we want when we want it. We sense that the world revolves around us. We are even told explicitly that we are special, “you’re the best baby”, “you’re so special”, “you’re the cutest”, and on and on for the rest of our childhood and teenage years. I grew up in a home with parents who constantly gave me reinforcement like this. I now have two young children of my own, and I find myself often doing the same. We love our children. They are the world to us. We believe our children are special, so we teach them that they are.
This teaching doesn’t stop with parents. For many of us, a family is the first and most influential institution we join, but it’s not the last. We proceed through life joining academic institutions, social institutions, religious institutions, political institutions, professional institutions, and so on. Sometimes we join voluntarily, and other times we are born into something. Through our association with each of these groups, we are taught to see the world and ourselves a certain way.
How do these groups start? With something people have in common. It could be a belief, an ability, a desire, a skill, or a physical characteristic. Most groups form with good intentions: To learn together, to help each other, or to change the world for the better.
I have been fortunate to join some great groups. I want to share a lesson I’ve learned from two of these groups: Silicon Valley and Harvard Business School.
Silicon Valley
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and work in the technology industry. Technology is rapidly changing the way people live everywhere across the globe, and being part of this change is exciting. It doesn’t matter if you live in Silicon Valley, Nebraska, or India. If you write code, know how to design and build engaging products, manage distributed teams, or market and sell innovative technology solutions, then you feel like you’re a part of this community of entrepreneurs and innovators.
It’s fun to join a community of people like you! You talk to others in the community about what you have in common. You develop shared language and references the group can use to differentiate between “us”, anyone inside the group, and “them”, anyone outside the group. This isn’t meant to be divisive in a negative way, it’s just easier if everyone in the group speaks the same language.
Silicon Valley and the global tech community definitely have their own language:
If you’re not growth-hacking viral loops with low-fidelity MVPs to validate product-market-fit faster than your burn-rate to either become a unicorn or be acqui-hired, then fail faster!
If this sentence makes no sense to you, don’t worry. Just know this, the tech world has created a shared language of jargon and acronyms that make it easy to know if someone is part of the community, “us”, or an outsider, “them”.
It feels good to be part of a group, and before long your group is part of your identity. The group influences who you are, how you live, and what you think. With time, it actually becomes difficult not to see the world as “us” and “them”. You notice all the differences between you and everyone outside of your group, but you are blind to the similarities you share. You begin to feel superior to “them”. I’ve caught myself with these superiority thoughts both here in Silicon Valley and when I was at Harvard.
Harvard
I learned and changed a lot at Harvard Business School, or as it’s known to those inside the community, “HBS”. Some change was for the better, and some change was for the worse.
As a new HBS student, you feel you are part of something special. HBS’ mission to “educate leaders who make a difference in the world” feels heavy and empowering at the same time. You are one of the future leaders of the world. You are special. At least, this is what I believed when I left campus two years later.
I loved the sense of purpose that joined us together as an HBS community. But just like any other group, as we drew closer together, we distanced ourselves from those outside of our group. We thought we were special, destined for greatness, maybe even better than other people.
This may not be surprising to you if you believe everyone at HBS fits the stereotype of trust-fund baby, partying, alcoholic, investment banker. But in fact, most of us did not fit this stereotype. I was married with a 6-month-old baby. I was paying for the experience with generous financial support from HBS and US government student loans. And many of my classmates came from far more challenging economic and social upbringings than I did. However, in ways I’m not proud of, I became the stereotype: prideful, entitled, demanding, selfish, and aloof. I believed I was special. I believed I was better than other people, and I first saw this in myself at a restaurant in Boston.
We were out to dinner with visiting family, and after a terrible dining experience I lectured the manager on the right way to treat customers. I even dropped the “H-bomb”, referencing my Harvard student status and threatening to share my bad experience with the other members of my powerful community of future leaders. As I left the restaurant that night I remember even feeling proud of myself, as if I was undoubtedly right and had to defend the moral ground I was standing on. Just thinking of this experience now makes me feel sick. I can’t believe I was “that guy”. But I was.
The groups we belong to change us. Some make us better. Some make us worse. Most do a little of both. I believe both Silicon Valley and Harvard have changed me more for the better than for the worse. I’m grateful for the experiences, relationships, and lessons I’ve learned from my association with these two groups. As I write this today, one lesson stands out from the rest, we need to watch ourselves and the groups we belong to. There is no “us” and “them”.
Groups gone wrong.
At the extreme, groups can become dangerous. The distance between “us” and “them” grows until the “us” group no longer recognizes the “them” group as members of the same human family. Once the divide is this great, violence follows.
Just look at the horrific examples from modern history. Members of the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan lynched thousands of African Americans in the United States from 1882–1968. The Nazis burned millions of innocent Jews in the inhumane furnaces of the concentration camps in the 1930s and 1940s. The Khmer Rouge’s Killing Fields in the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s left millions dead and nearly extinguished the Cham Muslim minority. In the 1990s, the Hutus murdered 70% of the Tutsi people during the 100-day Rwandan Genocide. And the genocide of the Yazidi people of Northern Iraq continues today at the hands of ISIS.
Scary.
It is hard to even believe humans are capable of such hate and terror. Yet, they are. We are. Do you think you are better than someone else? Do you think you are more special than someone else? How much better? How much more special? What do you deserve that they don’t? Opportunity? Money? Life itself?
You are not special, and nobody owes you anything.
Please don’t misunderstand me, you can DO special things. You are an incredible individual with talents, experiences, and potential that make you unique and valuable. You have the power to change yourself, change your circumstances, and change the world. That is special. It is this ability, our uniquely human ability to use reason, logic, and agency to think and act for ourselves that makes it possible for any one person to do amazing things. This is special. It doesn’t matter how you look at it, our human species being endowed by God with this power or the result of millions of years of evolution… WE are special.
But neither you, me, or anyone else is more special than any other person. I may have abilities you do not have. You may be born into more wealth or opportunity. I’m white. You’re black. You’re Muslim. I’m Christian. None of these differences between us matter.
You are not more special than me, and you don’t deserve more than I do. I am not more special than you, and I am not entitled to more than you are.
WE humans are special.
Don’t forget it! Use the special abilities and powers you have as a human being to do incredible things with your life. Make the world better. But don’t trick yourself, YOU alone are not special. There is no “us” and “them”, just humanity.
