making yourself proud

Hilma Af Klint

The Greeks say ethos anthropoi daimon. Character is fate. Otherwise, what unfolds in your life is a direct result of who you are: the incalculable sums of pluses and minuses in the margins of your choices.

At dinner in Noe Valley, I said it was possible to wake up one day and demand more from life. These days, I simply desire more. Grappling with the enormity of desire can be very painful and barbed. The blissful state of previous ignorance vanishes. In its place grows a gnawing sensation, a sense of anxious preoccupation.

Desire is productive. It extends directionally, pulls you. It demands nerve.

But anything worth having has its price. All too often, we find ourselves stagnant between knowing the standard with which we should conduct ourselves and acting upon it. We flinch at the work required to live up to our own ambitions. We want to reach an imagined destination without exerting the effort required to get there.

Say you want to write something good, suited to your taste. All you have to do is write, edit, read. Do those three repetitive actions for an absurdly long time. It really is that simple. Yet it requires enormous dedication and discipline. Thousands of words, thousands of hours, all for incremental improvement. The willingness to say you’ll try again even when you badly want to stop. But truly, this is the only way you earn self-trust. You show up to the base, and you keep the promises you’ve made. You don’t flinch.

In Joan Didion’s On Self Respect, she writes that character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs. We can fool everyone but ourselves:

The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself.

Her point is we are always performing internal reconciliation. Checks and balances against your own assessment of yourself. You always know when you’re being intellectually lazy or evading complexity. Cultivating self discipline gives us “the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.” If we don’t trust ourselves and maintain a sense of intrinsic worth, how can we recognize what we truly love?

I think about it as developing good faith toward my actions. In a two sided bargain, one party has good faith, trust and reliance, that person will do what they say and follow-through. With yourself, there is no contract or accountability. Only private integrity. When you keep your own promises, you make yourself proud.

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On our walk down the steep hills of Pac Heights, expansive ocean blue spread across every surface. I imagined if I peeled the paint down from house to house, the windows and walls would still linger blue like an echo. S and I discussed how many of our mutual friends have ‘written their own job spec.’ A company initially doesn’t have a scoped spot for this person because they are not confined to one particular definition. Instead, exceptional people acquire a ‘them-shaped hole’ — a place in an organization where they can pursue their excellence in ways that are hard to define or draw boundaries around.

What I've learned observing these people is that they're driven by a singularly high personal standard. A focus on inputs, with an uncommon disregard for how the outside world sees them. Opinions of others are fickle, anyway. Beloved one day, hated the next. Their certainty is not derivative, and instead springs from a deeper and more enduring well of self regard. In response, the external world reshapes itself to fit them better. Reality contains a surprising amount of malleability.

There’s a Borges afterword to his book of prose and poems in The Maker. He writes of a man who sets out to draw the world. He draws all the provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, fishes, instruments and stars. In the end, he discovers these lines “trace the lineaments of his own face.” When I first read it, I took it to mean that we are all composites of the world around us, that the self is assembled from external material. Now I believe the inverse is also true. The world is shaped by an internal vitality, by what I do when no one is watching.