Pride

If I have one of the 7 deadly sins, it’s pride. Okay, forget the “if” part. I can be awfully prideful. There are many people who would argue that pride isn’t a bad thing. Afterall, you should take pride in your work, appearance, manners, etc. Others would list pride as a virtue for those very examples. But there is a reason that it’s often been repeated that pride goes before the fall. I’ll grant you that pride can have its place, just like anything else. It is self interest in your outward appearance to others. In other words, you should care about that. If you don’t then that could be sloth and that’s a different one of the seven.

Are you confused yet?

The kind of pride I’m talking about is the ugly kind. There are a lot of definitions for it. I’ll give you mine. It’s an overestimation of your own self-worth. While that can sound fairly harmless, thinking that your crap doesn’t stink can lead to all sorts of issues. The least of which is a lot of frustration and disappointment. The worst is probably being an unlikeable bastard.

I know it’s sounds weird coming from me when I’ve already lectured you about confidence. I tell you that confidence matters more than anything else and I turn around and tell you don’t believe your own PR. I’m not saying this is necessarily an easy path to walk all the time. I have a healthy sense of my own value. I also have struggled with being too full of myself at times. It’s led me to bite off more than I can chew on more than one occasion. Many of those instances were painful lessons to learn. And I did them to myself out of pride.

See, just like anything else pride can be a good thing until you have too much of it. It’s almost like a cosmic chemical reaction. You add to much of something to a thing and it becomes something else. If you accumulate a decent amount of money, you’re frugal. Too much and you’re greedy. Some knowledge makes you smart. Too much and you become pretentious. Pride can make you confident and strong. More than you need makes you arrogant.

So how do you know when enough becomes too much? You experiment. You test yourself and your abilities. You stay humble. Most importantly, you admit when you’re wrong or screw up. If you find yourself blaming someone else for your failure, if you look to find fault in others then you know you’re getting full of yourself. You couldn’t have messed up, right? You don’t make mistakes, so it had to be someone or something else. It’s not you. It’s them. You didn’t lose that game. The ump screwed you. The other team cheated. It had to be that because it can’t be you. That’s when pride takes over and gets ugly. That’s not the person you want to be.

You have to be honest with yourself. Get comfortable in your own skin. When you can do that it’s a lot easier to admit when you’re wrong or you’ve made a mistake. And when I say admitting you messed up I don’t mean rolling your eyes and saying “Oh, so I guess everything is my fault.” That’s pride run amok. It doesn’t earn you any respect. Worse yet, it makes you look like a jackass. Owning it when you are wrong or when you fail makes you appear strong and confident. That is something to be proud of. People respect it.

That all sounds easy. It’s not. It’s hard when someone you view as lesser than you, due to your abundance of pride, does better or proves you wrong. You’ll be angry or frustrated. You lost out to “that guy” and you really don’t like “that guy”. But if you let pride consume you then you are “that guy”. Understand that the mistake in this example wasn’t that you let him get the better of you. It’s that you put that person beneath you. You believed yourself to be better than someone else based on a feeling you had about them. That was the mistake. Be mad at yourself, not for failing but for dismissing someone else before you had any reason to. You should approach each person as if they have something to teach you. If you don’t, if you can’t grant another person the smallest amount of decency and humanity, then you’ve let pride win. That’s when you really lose.

And that’s when you learn that gravity is a harsh mistress.