The thing about people is, we more readily blame our virtues for failure than our vices.
According to most people, other people are ahead because they are willing to do more terrible things, less quality work, or undertake less conscientious actions.
“And I am not because I am not willing to,” we say.
Well, maybe not we all. I know I do anyway.
I believe, although I might be wrong, that it is an utterly human trait to always associate our misery with our virtue.
Our premise for justifying this thinking is believing that inherently, life is not fair. And frankly, that is not an outlandish stance to have. After all, we all have witnessed the good die young and the bad almost quite literally live forever. People don’t always get what they deserve, people die before reaping the good they planted, and people get cheated all the time without compensation or retribution.
But walk with me for a second. Or, say, 5 minutes.
Just imagine this:
What if life is fair? Or at least, fairer than we give it credit for?
What if you aren’t where you’re supposed to be because you are the villain?
What if you are the reason things aren’t working out for you?
Indulge me for just the length of this newsletter alone.
The travesty of goodness
I like to joke that the only difference between good people and bad people is that good people will admit that they are bad, while bad people think they are good.
When things fall apart for most of us, we more readily blame it on the good in us. We say, “That person took advantage of me because I was too calm…”
“I work too hard”. “I love too much”. “I’m too kind”.
We seldom revise our strategy or take stock of our ineptitudes—the real ineptitudes that we know we have, not all these closeted self-affirming compliments that we disguise as flaws.
Let me give a mild example.
When I write something and people don’t read it, I could say “People don’t read anymore” or, “People prefer content that doesn’t make them think”.
It’s self-justifying because it sounds true.
Most people who do read would also readily agree with it because they like to believe that they are part of the select few in society who still care to digest intelligent information from written text.
But that’s not true at all.
People do read!
Some information sources get thousands of reads and feedback daily. And they aren’t all gossip mills or tabloids.
News Flash: some of my most trusted sources of information are actually popular.
But then, my mind might not be able to withstand such cognitive dissonance.
So my next course of action to defend myself would be to say, “Well maybe these popular platforms/newsletters/blogs/websites are just good at disguising the truth but I’m just too honest to do that”. Or, “They’re just using a lot of techniques that aren’t exactly making the writing better, but making it easier to digest”.
(And I mean the latter as a knock to them as if to say, “I write the way writings should be written, not for ‘content’ or for watered down focus”.)
Blaming your vices
Now, that is a classic example of blaming your virtues instead of your vices.
Because all along, am I really telling myself the truth? Arent there more questions I could ask?
Like:
Perhaps I’m too self-indulgent, not considering the needs or wants of my target audience? Could I be more consistent with not just writing, but also sharing my work? Could I be perhaps more considerate of people’s time and energy levels? Could I put myself in the audience’s shoes and really figure out what makes the things I like more likeable or enjoyable? Can I find out how to distil information more effectively, and in a more engaging way—maybe take a writing course or something?
Now I’m just spitballing, and to be frank, the entire scenario I painted above isn’t really something I’ve thought or said to myself about writing.
However, what I’m saying is that the first way of thinking—blaming our virtues—already assumes we know the problem. But the other one is open to learning more about it.
Interestingly, not only does the first way of thinking assume it knows the problem, it also assumes the problem is unsolvable because solving it would force us to go against our good values. Basically, it assumes the problem is the way others think, not us. That we are already perfect and they need to catch up.
What about you? What ways could ‘blaming your virtues’ be sabotaging your own life?
You don’t have to be hard on yourself too. For instance, Instead of considering that your boss just hates you and wants to keep you down, maybe you could victim-blame yourself just a little and say “Even though I am the hardest working member of my team, maybe I never became a manager because I don’t know how to nurture talent and would rather do all the work (and give back 100% quality) than trust or train interns to do it to their best ability (which they can only do at a 40-50% quality rating at best).”
So you’re acknowledging that you indeed have a strength (doing quality work), but that you also have a weakness (not nurturing talent or not giving them room to grow).
Or maybe I wasn’t chosen to lead the department because I’m not a team player and I am too quick to throw my teammates or the weakest links under the bus because I refuse to be blamed for their failings when I do good work.
Or maybe I’m not getting good raises because I’m not negotiating well enough for myself and I do not really believe I deserve to get paid as much as I should.
Here, you are admitting that your weakness as a negotiator is costing you fair compensation. Accepting that, yes, people should be compensated fairly for work without having to strongarm their employers. But also, most people (likely, including yourself) can’t resist a good bargain so is it really anyone’s fault if you keep presenting yourself to be one? Most of us don’t go to the market and buy from the trader with the highest prices—we go low and then go up, only if we have to.
So maybe “I work too hard”, “I care too much”, and “I give too much to my job” aren’t really the reasons things aren’t working out for you.
Of course, the above three quote examples may be real, true reasons why a hardworking, honest employee won’t get bumped up. I believe it does happen often.
But I guess the real question is, how likely is it that this is what happened to you?
Nine other things worth sharing
My last two newsletters were my most read EVER.
That’s 30 posts later, which isn’t even bad at all.
But what is interesting is that the last two newsletters were the hardest to publish because I flopped on the weekly planning for it and found myself having to make last-minute rushes to complete them. I guess the lesson is to just keep going eh?NVIDIA just revealed Project GR00T, a multimodal AI system that acts as the "mind" for advanced humanoid robots — enabling them to learn skills and interact with the real world. The idea, I guess, is for GR00T to help translate high-level capabilities into low-level robot behaviours that can help embodied AIs reason and act in more human-like ways. I guess it’s too late now. Sorry James Cameron, we ignored Terminator.
Tim Denning thinks if you want to improve your life and even possibly attain financial freedom while doing a day job, you need to be doing these things after your 9-5.
I read, On Rekindling Your Joy for your craft (and Why You Must) by Alex Mathers. An excerpt:
When you switch your attention away from quick results to getting a little better at the craft every day, you'll begin to fall in love with it.
Getting too hung up on outcomes is more for amateurs, who eventually burn out.
It’s why so many people quit when things don’t go their way. They get disappointed easily because they rely on views, likes and money fast - all results. Their measure for success is unhelpful in this way.
If you don’t see the results you want right away, that’s okay because by doing the thing, you develop your craft and resilience, which is already a success.
Some time ago, a Twitter (X) user posted this:
The fact that you have to use your personal facebook account to manage a business ad account is unbelievably idiotic. How is this a $900b market cap company?
I read this X thread by author Visakan Veerasamy talking about how Product Market fit works and also spoke generally about how we (users) always make the mistake of assuming popular, wealthy, and lucrative things (and even people) cannot also be stupid because we think you must be really smart to succeed.
It is a LOOONNGGG thread so I’m just going to share an excerpt from his reply:The critical life lesson here is that you can be “unbelievably idiotic” and still win big. Do you realize this? Do you feel it in your bones? Because lots of people don’t realize this. Lots of people think “I will be successful if I become less stupid, less incompetent, less fail, less embarrassing...”
This is almost entirely back-asswards, an illusion caused by media bias, narrative bias, selection bias, halo effects. I am trying to help people see that they can be much more successful than they realize, imagine or expect, because it’s their expectations, imagination and models of reality that are miscalibrated. You can be smart about a thousand things that don’t matter or you can be smart about like the 5 things that do. Some will say “oh why not be smart about 1005 things” but in a sense the 6th thing is a distraction from the first thing.
I discovered a new creator: the.canov (on IG). If your job has anything to do with social media or media strategy, his page is indispensable.
Made this LinkedIn post for my latest FWT article.
I was talking with my sister about limiting beliefs today and she told me:
“Stop thinking about what you don’t want to be. The energy will translate. Think about what you want to be”.
I remember reading something similar from a Tony Robbins book when he explained that when he was learning racing, his instructor told him that whenever he loses control of the car, he shouldn’t look at the place he doesn’t want it to end up (like the pavement or the telephone pole). Instead, he should focus on the place he wants to go, which is the road. Apparently, when you are too conscious of trying not to hit something, you eventually do hit it.Existentialist Kafka to end the newsletter today:
