TOMAS CHAMORRO-PREMUZIC: Are you a narcissist?
Here's a quick self-assessment so that you can find out.
This is based on some of the questions that are typically
used in research to evaluate or assess non clinical narcissism.
Number one, I love being the center of attention.
Two, I would rather be rich and famous than a good person.
Three, I'm often jealous of other people's success.
Four, I'm easily annoyed when others criticize me.
Five, people who know me appreciate my talents.
Six, I view myself more favorably than others do.
Seven, I like to surround myself with people who admire me.
Eight, I crave other people's approval.
Nine, I am destined for greatness.
Number 10, I find it hard to fake humility.
10 is the best.
You add one point for every statement that you agree with.
If you score between 0 and 3, you're
probably a cultural outlier, the last humble person
on Earth in today's narcissistic kind of age.
If you're between 4 and 6, you're
probably average, which may sound like an insult.
The worst thing you can tell somebody
who is very narcissistic is that they're average.
But in general, this is a good thing.
And if you're between 7 and 10, then you really
probably are the perfect customer for social media
platforms and a cultural emblem or reference for the AI age.
Narcissism is a personality trait usually considered
part of the dark side of personalities, characterized
by overconfidence and unrealistic and deluded sense
of self-worth or an ego that is detached
from actual and real achievements.
Narcissism can be a bit of a double-edged sword.
So on the one hand, it makes you antisocial.
On the other hand, it can lead to other people
thinking that you are talented, even when you're not,
and overestimating your skills and achievements.
Digital narcissism is a manifestation of narcissism.
Most, if not all, of these platforms,
especially social media platforms,
they have incentivized us to behave
in ways that would generally be considered
pretty obnoxious and undesirable in the analog world.
If you spend all day talking about yourself,
promoting yourself, wanting to be the center of attention
and ignoring others and not listening to others,
you probably won't be seen as a very nice and likable
colleague.
But if you're not doing all these things online,
your social media status and rank goes down.
All of these platforms are actually
feeding into our narcissistic tendencies.
And they have made the average person today
far more narcissistic than the average person
20 or 50 years ago.
The desire for fame and something
that psychologists call the need for uniqueness--
we wouldn't have cathedrals or operas and great buildings
or any manifestation of culture, including science,
if it weren't for people's desire
to prove themselves to others and achieve a certain level
of success and fame.
But when our admiration for people who are famous
is diluted to being famous just for the sake of being famous,
then, I think, we have a problem.
There's some really nice longitudinal studies
that show that in the 1920s, only 20% or 25% of young people
aspired to being famous.
And that, then, increased to about 50% in the '80s.
And that is now close to 80%.
If you have a population really expecting their lives
and careers to end up in Kanye West or Kim Kardashian-like
fame, it's going to be a lot of people
who end up either disappointed or just completely detached
from reality.
And I think today, especially if we're
looking at TikTok and the rise of TikTok influencers
who achieve a lot of fame, often without really adhering
to old-school parameters of talents, skills,
or accomplishments, it's just a replication
or the perpetuation of the Kim Kardashianalization of success.
The paradox with narcissism is that the highs
that you get from getting other people's approval
comes at the expense of cost in the long term.
You become so dependent on what other people think of you
that you're actually ending up very,
very neurotic and very insecure.
This really creates a casino-like effect.
It creates a short high, maybe a dopamine kind of reinforcement
that makes us feel good about ourselves.
But in the long term, it makes us very dependent on that.
Much like in the casino, the longer
you keep playing, the more likely it is that you lose.
Quite frankly, there has never been a better time
to rediscover the value of humility, the ability to be
aware of your limitations.
Humble people are more able to listen to others.
They are more able to stay quiet when they have nothing to say.
And they also have the ability to be self-critical
and to understand that they are not as good as they want to be
or as they should be.
If you are capable of identifying
a gap between the skills or the abilities you have
and the ones you want to have, that's a great opportunity
to get better.
If you want to lose weight, it helps
to understand what your weight is.
If you want to have a healthier lifestyle,
it helps to understand how healthy or unhealthy you are.
And with that comes the ability to derisk.
And if I know that I'm actually not very well prepared
for a job interview or for a client presentation,
well, I wouldn't go into that job interview or client
presentation ill prepared.
I spent a lot of time working with leaders.
And the great leaders are different from other leaders.
They're able to understand their limitations.
They don't believe their own hype.
And that enables them to actually continue
to get better.
Everybody can become more humble or harness
a reputation for being humble.
It starts with spending less time online and less time
on these very toxic and narcissistic environments,
but partly also finding alternative ways of being
and relating to others in the analog or offline world.
I mean, it really helps to surround yourself
with people who can help you become more self-critical.
It helps to work with people, colleagues or managers
or your teammates who actually provide you
with a little bit of constructive negative critical
feedback.
It helps to change the way we ask or request feedback
from others.
Instead of asking people, wasn't I great,
or, wasn't this amazing, you could ask them,
what would you have done differently?
Or what are the two things that you
didn't like about my presentation, my assignment,
my performance, et cetera?
It's not very pleasant to realize that things aren't
great, especially with you, with your skills,
with your achievements.
But that's really what distinguishes high achievers
from the rest.
If we live in a world where everybody is self-obsessed
and everybody is self-promoting, your humility
will pay off even more because you will stand out.
And you will shine, especially because everybody else
is so focused on themselves.
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