As someone once said to me: ‘Integrity is being the same person in your house that you are on the street.’ Perhaps more important than integrity, however, I think consistency has the power to make or break one’s self-image. How can you live with yourself if you feel like you have to put on an act for the world?
Who do I respect the most? Not the people who are out there trying to win my respect; otherwise, there would be an arms race. No, it’s those people who were going to do whatever it is they do anyway, whether they win my respect or not. Their doing whatever it is they do is the side-effect, not the megaton confetti cannon of respect I might have‚ because they just don’t care. Life just works better in a society that’s 50 percent CGI. You can do pretty much anything you want, so long as you approach it with the right packaging. If it means having cooler friends, dating future presidents, or getting a million-dollar business deal, then it’s worth spending millions on marketing.
I have struggled with this problem for some time, though. On the one hand, not caring about how other people see you make your sense of self free of dependence, and is the only way to earn any respect from anyone else; on the other, a world that thrives on first impressions means that people see the cut of your jib before they see any of your ‘integrity’.
Dressing for Yourself
An acquaintance told me once that he dresses for himself, not to impress other people. Whether or not this was intended as a philosophical point, I think it contains the seeds of how to resolve the paradox I posed in the opening of this article.
Sure, some of us aren’t trying to wow anyone, and we can be cool that way. But hardly anyone’s cool for so long without actually trying to have heart. No, the ones who aren’t putting on a show are rarely cool. They’re the people who didn’t spend a moment dressing themselves up and getting things in order, and spiffing up their resumes. Life isn’t going to be kind to them because they’re good people.
I think a better way is the way my friend spoke of it. Dress your best, but to impress yourself. I think this philosophy translates to so much more than fashion. Any time that you’re doing anything to fatten up a résumé or become popular or market yourself to people around you, make your goal to impress yourself, not other people.
Private Motivation
Impressing other people should always be an unintended byproduct of how you lead your life, not a core motivator. And there’s another risk in making impressiveness your focus: that it’ll be harder to stay motivated by shallow reasons than by reasons that run deeper.
Oh, don’t get me wrong; I don’t think I’m doing anything heroic or anything, but let’s be honest — the handful of achievements I have in my life were not done for them. I didn’t become a vegetarian. I didn’t start getting up at 5 am. I didn’t read 70 books in one year. It wasn’t so that I could write a blog about any of them.
A year ago — about the time I was just getting the site off the ground — a regular reader wrote to me with a guerrilla marketing tip. ‘Try a crazy experiment like the polyphasic sleep thing that Steve Pavlina wrote about,’ he advised. They were the first words of advice he’d ever sent, and while it might have gathered a few more visitors, I told him how much I didn’t want my self-help adventures to turn into a marketing ploy. I’m not saying that convivial slumber was Steve’s marketing incentive; I’m quite certain it wasn’t, but it couldn’t be mine.
I could not do it. I could not work for months of my life to do something, and just write an article about it afterwards. Public performance requires private motivation. Not the motivation to perform for others, but to still be that way when nobody is looking.
How to Impress Yourself
Impress—impress yourself first and foremost. I do that all the time. I set my clothing style, my communication patterns, and my goals all to be what I deem more of what I want to be than what other people expect me to be. I don’t ignore the rest of the stuff that I’ve picked up from first impressions and marketing gurus. I just pride myself in the view that my primary objective is to impress myself and it’s their prerogative if they think something different.
That is a liberating attitude, but it is difficult to achieve. I’m no role model for perfection. Certainly, it takes discipline to keep yourself focused on your imagined self-image and not on other people’s immediate reactions, which often antagonize you and pull you off track. It’s usually much easier to take a shortcut in life, as I did with Hitler, than it is to have integrity.
When I notice myself exercising for the sake of something else that feels a bit ‘impressive’, I try to twist that appreciation back upon itself. I go to the gym not to look good for other people, but to be strong, fit and healthy, and to look good for myself. Bringing your motivations inward helps you ignore the shallow noises from other people and focus on the deeper drives that inform them.