Transcriber: Eunice Tan Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
What I want to talk to you about tonight is a little bit different,
so I want to forewarn you.
I did have a student one time,
some years ago when I was teaching my students about color
and telling them that color doesn't exist in the object but in the brain,
he got so upset that he cussed at me,
grabbed his bag, and stormed out the door.
So I'm hoping not to have that reaction tonight.
But -
one of the most pervasive ideas
that you find in modern American society in the last 50 years
is self-esteem.
Now, you've probably all google-searched things
just to see how many hits it got.
I think it was somewhere around 50 million hits for self-esteem -
that many websites had referenced it.
And most of them were blaming low self-esteem
for every kind of social ill.
So low self-esteem is blamed
for poor school performance, violent behavior, all kinds of things.
And what I want to suggest to you tonight
or encourage you to do tonight
is to lose your self-esteem.
Now, notice I'm not saying lose your high self-esteem
or lose your low self-esteem;
I'm saying lose your self-esteem altogether.
Now, we are raised as children in America to think a lot about ourselves,
to reference ourselves a lot.
In many cultures, you don't get this quite as often,
but with children in America, we ask them to reference themselves:
"How do you feel? What are you thinking?
Are you happy?
How do you feel about yourself?"
We ask these kinds of questions all the time.
So you and I naturally reference ourselves a lot.
So during a given day,
we think a lot about how we're doing, how we feel:
How do I feel about myself? Do I like myself? Do I not like myself?
So this is very common for us.
But it's a kind of burden that we carry every day,
where we have to be thinking about this all the time.
So my encouragement to you is
let go.
Now, I'm going to give you three steps -
they're relatively easy steps -
in how to lose your self-esteem, tonight.
The first step is experience genuine gratitude.
Now, as I mentioned,
self-esteem is something that we do in the United States
but isn't necessarily that common in other parts of the world.
And one of the writers that I appreciate on this subject, from India,
is a Buddhist writer, a lama, Geshe Tegchok.
And he wrote a book called "The Kindness of Others."
And he makes a couple of arguments in there
that I want to suggest to you as ways of getting rid of your self-esteem.
The first one is that all of the good we have in our lives comes from others.
Now, I know this disagrees with the way you and I usually see the world,
but let's just start with the clothes you're wearing today.
How many of you made the clothes you're wearing today?
I have one, thank you!
But I'd imagine even for those that make the clothes they're wearing -
that's pretty awesome, that's rare -
(Laughter)
you probably didn't raise the sheep, card the wool, make the thread, all these.
Right?
People have done stuff for us.
So when I think about my shoes - I didn't make my shoes.
In fact, I have no idea who made my shoes.
But somebody did.
I know in America, since we watch the sort of "how things are made,"
we often imagine
that all the stuff we wear is made on a machine,
but most of it isn't.
You may know that.
Especially the clothes that you wear; they're made by hand.
Now, I've been in parts of the world
where I've gotten to see people make this stuff.
So I was one time in the Southeastern part of China
and went to a factory where they made sweaters,
and I went to a factory where they were making light fixtures for Walmart.
So very well could it be that you bought one of those.
They were doing it by hand on long metal poles,
blowing the glass into the shape that they needed to.
They were very friendly, very kind to me.
But these are people,
people that made all your clothes
and are willing to work for wages that you aren't willing to work for
and in many ways couldn't work for.
It's their kindness that gives you clothes to wear.
How about the food you eat?
I would guess that most of you, the food you've eaten today
was not raised by you, grown by you, prepared by you -
even in most cases in America, we hardly even cook our own food anymore.
This was done by somebody.
And their kindness to do that for you is why you have what you have.
So we often speak in America about self-sufficiency,
but it's an illusion of sorts.
We can say, "I'm self-sufficient.,
but in reality, you've got tons of people in the world as your support team,
showing you kindness.
And when we experience that gratitude, which is just real,
it helps us lose the sense
that we're the most important person in the world.
Another thing that Tegchok says
is there's a simple calculation we can make:
that there is only one of me
and there are billions of others.
So it would be a bit embarrassing or shameful
for me to spend my life thinking about the one
and neglecting the billions of others.
But maybe it kind of makes sense that I focus on the others
and neglect the one.
And I mean that, even neglect.
Don't worry about it.
One of my - I have four daughters.
And the first time I had a teacher call us in
because our daughter was struggling in school or something -
we didn't actually know what it was.
She said, "I'd like to talk to you about your daughter."
And we got this feeling in our guts like,
"Oh no, she's done something terrible.
Maybe she's murdering classmates one by one or something."
I'm kidding, but -
So we went in to see the teacher,
and she said, "I have this program in the class" -
we actually knew about it -
but she said, "The students can earn points by doing stuff,
turning assignments in, helping around the classroom."
This is a pretty typical thing you find.
And what they could do with those points at the end
is they accumulate
and then certain times during the year,
they could use them in an auction to buy toys.
And these were just toys that were like stuffed animals
and little toys that people had at home that they donated to the classroom.
But my daughter Asia would spend a lot of time trying to earn points.
But the interesting thing was -
and this was what the teacher pointed out to us,
though we kind of knew it -
was that at the beginning of each round of this,
she would go and look at all of the things that she could get,
and she would think,
"I'm going to get that one for this sister,
that one for this sister, that one for this sister."
She never thought about what she would get herself,
and never got anything for herself.
So the teacher's concern
was she spends all this time and she doesn't get anything out of it.
And we were like, "Oh, that's it?
Oh, we were so worried that she was being a terrible student."
And we said, "That's what we want."
And she said, "Why?
Doesn't she need to think about herself?"
And we said, "No."
And this is the way we explained our reasoning.
There are six of us in our family of four girls.
If we each think about ourself,
we have one person concerned about our needs.
When we think about each other,
we have five.
So if she just thinks about everybody else
and doesn't worry about herself,
everybody else is going to take care of her anyway.
And that's the reality that Tegchok is trying to get across to us:
people have been taking care of you all along anyway.
So the idea that somehow you earned your way to where you are,
of course, is a bit silly.
So, we sometimes know this,
but we forget it.
And so we spend a lot of time thinking about loving ourselves.
I recently had a student say in class - so earnestly, he said,
"But don't you need to love yourself?"
And I said, "No."
There's no gap; there's no hole that's left.
The love of the people around me, whether it's my wife and children,
my close friends,
even people across the world that I don't know
that serve me and benefit me in so many ways.
I'm plenty well taken care of.
There's no hole that needs to be filled.
And low self-esteem in particular has a kind of trick to it,
because with low self-esteem, there's a kind of accusation.
Because if everybody loved me enough, I don't have to love me.
But by saying that I need to love myself,
I'm saying you're not doing a good enough job.
I had a student tell me just this last week
that she was sitting with a roommate for three hours,
listening to this roommate's problems and concerns and all this kind of stuff.
And she was happy to do it; she's a lovely person.
But at the end of the three hours, the roommate said,
"I just wish somebody in the world loved me."
And my student was saying,
"I just spent three hours listening to you."
But that's the trap of low self-esteem:
it's never enough.
The whole world could come at your feet
and tell you how amazing you are and how much they love you,
and do good things for you,
and you're still going to want more
because it's a never-ending pit that you find yourself in.
All right, so that's the first one.
The second way to help you lose your self-esteem
is to admit and realize that you're not really that amazing.
Now, I realize this is kind of heresy in America,
that we're all taught to think that we're just so incredibly amazing.
But this is something I find even with my students.
I ask them to write down five words that describe them,
and I invariably have everybody write down positive words.
Now, it's not that they don't know
that they have traits about themselves that are poor or not that great.
But it does illustrate how in our culture
we're expected to only think of and talk about
the positive aspects of ourselves.
And this, I believe, encourages a kind of delusion.
Because you and I know quite well -
and, in fact, we know it sometimes so acutely that it's painful -
that we fail and aren't good enough in very important ways.
Not even just in ways that maybe we can blame on our mom and dad
or something like that.
But ways in which we fail, we know we fail, and it's our fault.
It's painful.
So contrast that sort of focus only on the positive
with a student I had in New Delhi
when we were studying the great psychologist Alfred Adler.
He says that young children who have significant health problems
often grow up to be self-centered and see the world as hostile.
It's a long story of why he says that.
But this student of mine wrote her paper about that,
and she said, "I had health problems when I was really young,
and continue to have them,
and I'm kind of like that."
And because she could see that in herself,
see herself fully as she wholly was rather than just one piece,
things changed for her.
And I would say
she's one of the more loving, popular, and great leaders among her peers
that I know.
This also reminds me of a time -
this is also India, but now my daughter named India -
I was her soccer coach.
And she came off the field one day,
and she said, "Dad, I'm not good at soccer."
And I said, "That's true."
(Laughter)
But it was.
Now, that's interesting that we find that so surprising.
But I told her, "Well, that's true."
And she said, "Well, I don't want to be that good; it's not fun."
And I said, "Well, let's talk a little bit
about why you're not as good as the other people on the field."
I said, "They play a lot.
They play with their siblings, parents.
I don't know - they played soccer since they were a little child."
She hardly ever played
outside of playing at games and a few practices along the way.
She's only young.
So I said to her,
"If you want to be good at soccer,
I can help you get there.
I'm your coach.
Your mom also played soccer.
We can help give you some training.
You can train a few hours every day at different kinds of things."
And she said, "Ooh.
I'm not sure I want to be that good."
(Laughter)
Now, I said to her, "How good do you want to be?"
She said, "Well,
I want to be good enough to enjoy it."
That seemed so smart to me -
what a brilliant way of talking about it.
She is good at a lot of things;
now, I hope, she's a little better at soccer,
that she can at least enjoy herself while she's doing it.
But had I told her, which is the typical response,
"No, honey, you're amazing!
You're the greatest player out there!"
I do two things:
First, I'm lying because it's not true.
She's not good.
The second thing is I don't allow her an opportunity to see herself clearly
and then to remedy that situation if she chooses to.
By telling her she's great,
she has no opportunity to see herself as somebody who needs to be improving,
working harder at it.
So the second thing, then,
is you're not that great,
and you kind of know it,
and that's okay.
In a sense, we have to be okay with not being that okay.
Because you're the same as the rest of us.
The third step that I would tell you tonight
that you can do to help you lose your self-esteem
is to do the good you can do
rather than regret the good that you can't.
Now, we're told in American society that if we just worked hard enough,
we could be as rich as Bill Gates,
as great a humanitarian as Mother Teresa,
and as influential as Gandhi.
That just is not true; I'm sorry to have to tell you that.
I know your mom told you that you can do anything you want,
you can be President, all these things.
It's just not true - we kind of know that.
We run up against that in our lives, and it's true.
But you don't need to worry about that or feel guilty about it
or think you have to be other than that
because there is good you can do in your way,
sometimes small way, sometimes no one will know it.
But there's good you can do.
So do the good you can do
rather than worry about the good you can't.
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist
and also a survivor of a concentration camp
in World War II.
And he said that you can't achieve your life's purpose
by trying to achieve your life's purpose.
It sounds paradoxical,
but what he means by that is you are not your life's purpose.
So you can't achieve your life's purpose by trying to achieve your life's purpose.
Your purpose is something other than you.
He said, "You don't find your life's meaning and purpose
within your own psyche but in the world,
in doing the good that you can do,
not the good that somebody else can."
Another one of my favorite writers, a Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, said -
and he compares this or analogizes it to a final judgment after we die -
he said, "When you reach that final judgment,
God will not ask you, "Why were you not Moses?"
He will ask you,
"Why were you not" - in my case - "Matthew?"
I don't need to do the work of Mother Teresa
or be as rich as Bill Gates to do good.
I can just be me.
And even though that good might be very small,
seemingly insignificant,
that's what I can do.
I can be happy with that, find joy in that.
When I was a freshman at university during a darker time of my life,
there was a lady who was the Dorm Mom.
Her name was Mrs. Halvorson.
She was, I think, probably in her seventies,
and she took note of me, I'm not sure why.
She's passed away since, so I can't ask her the question.
Why did she take note of me?
I don't know, but she did.
And I was going in to get my mail from the office one day,
and she started talking to me.
And she said, "I learned, I read something today
that said everybody needs to be told that they are loved five times a day."
And then she said, "I love you. I love you. I love you.
I love you. I love you."
And then we carried on with our days.
From that day forward, she told me every day.
And I don't know how she did it;
maybe she had like a tripwire.
I like to imagine a 70-year-old lady setting up a tripwire in my dorm room
so that when I walked in, she knew.
But somehow, I would walk in my room, sometimes late at night,
and the phone would ring and I'd pick it up -
I got used to it after a while, I knew who it was -
and I would hear, "I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Good night."
(Laughter)
Now, was that a big thing?
Was that publicized until today?
No.
But was it a big thing for me?
Absolutely.
So she did the good that she could do.
She didn't need to be somebody famous or a famous humanitarian.
She could be a great person in her own way.
So my argument tonight, then, for you
is you don't need to esteem yourself positively or negatively.
The burden you carry
is partly because in our culture we view ourselves as separate individuals.
So we think a lot about how we're doing, how we feel about ourselves.
You don't need to do that; you can let go of that.
Because, in fact, we are not separate individuals
but interconnected with each other.
Leo Tolstoy wrote a short story, and the lesson he taught in that story
was that in this life
we are not given to know what we need for ourselves,
but given to know what other people need.
This binds us together in love.
So I know what you need, you know what I need,
which means I don't need to think about myself.
I'll let you take care of it,
and I'll do what I can to take care of you.
There's something so much more beautiful,
so much more elegant,
so much more fulfilling
than that little tiny self you're trying to esteem and hang on to.
So I ask you tonight, lose your self-esteem, please.
(Applause)