Ego and envy guide much of our thinking. How do we control these emotions that can push us towards making problematic decisions?
One way to soothe our craving for personal attention is to have a backlog of personal accomplishments that we can refer to. A quantifiable accomplishment that we can look back at can calm our ego–whether it is our diploma, our bank account balance, or a painting that we drew.
There is the famous anecdote about LinkedIn profile views–most of the views on a LinkedIn profile are from the owner of that profile. It’s a nice professional mirror.
Kanye West listens to his own music. There is an anecdote from someone who lived with Kanye, who said he would spend lots of time alone in his room, listening to his songs. This was before Kanye was famous.
Kanye spent years working on music before he reached the level of success he wanted. How could his ego cope with the fact that he was not finding popularity? He could soothe his ego by listening to his own music, ensconced in his own artistic vision.
An artist knows when their art is improving. The more art they produce over time, the more they can track their progress through the improvement of their artifacts. Kanye made “five beats a day for three summers”. By listening to his own music, he could trace through his chronicle of improvements.
We can tame our narcissism by looking back at our own works of art. We see our own improvements. When we look at what we created 2 years ago, we remember that the piece seemed so good at the time, and yet when we look back now we see the immaturity of our artistic self 2 years in the past.
We can subdue our envy by creating distinct art that nobody else can copy, making ourselves incomparable. If we are incomparable, we are in our own category. There is nobody else to envy.
At a small scale, we can do this by looking back at our own Instagram feed. At a large scale, we can build a business, and tie our livelihood to our creative output. The Internet has given us infinite flavors of creativity to build our self-indulgent artifacts in.
We can spend our day embedded in our own creative atmosphere. When we do this, the ego is constantly relieved like a pliant muscle–and it makes us acutely aware of how badly we want to share our art with others. This makes us more open to respecting the art of others by giving other artists genuine, fully aware attention.