The Devastation Of Pride
THE DEVASTATION OF PRIDE
WE MUST PREPARE FOR PRIDE AND KILL IT EARLY—OR IT
WILL KILL WHAT WE ASPIRE TO.
– Ryan Holiday, author
THE DEVASTATION OF PRIDE
he great French author Victor Hugo remarked, "Pride is the fortress of evil in a man." G.K. Chesterton said, "Pride is a poison so very poisonous that it not only poisons the virtues, it even poisons the other vices."
Pride is often the sin that lies beneath so many of our flaws. I remember hearing Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway remark about the corruption on Wall Street that contributed to the financial crisis back in 2008. He said most people blamed it all on greed. However, Munger believes so many of the traders were driven to unethical behavior when they learned a colleague several doors down was making a million dollars a year more than they were. They were controlled by pride and jealousy, not greed.
Bloomberg television, a very popular business channel, has a regular program called Game Changers. The show features the life stories of influential leaders who have had an impact on the world of business. One of their most interesting programs covered the life of Larry Ellison, the CEO and founder of Oracle Corporation, an incredibly successful computer software company. Ellison is currently the fifth highest person on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list. His current net worth is 49 billion dollars.
You would think Larry Ellison has it made with nothing to worry about. However, his life is fixated on Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. Ellison compares his life, his company, and particularly his wealth to that of Gates and Microsoft. Those who have worked for him will tell you that his greatest desire in life is to dethrone Gates and be recognized as America's richest person. You would think he could find contentment with all of his wealth and accomplishments, but he continually compares himself to Gates and is driven to overtake him. There was an article in Harvard Business Review that blamed it on Ellison's greed. However, this discontentment is clearly what pride does to a person. As C.S. Lewis put it: "It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest."
"PRIDE IS A POISON, SO VERY POISONOUS, IT NOT ONLY
POISONS THE VIRTUES, IT EVEN POISONS THE OTHER
VICES." (G. K. CHESTERSON)
What I find to be so fascinating are the strong words that people use to describe pride. C.S. Lewis concludes that it is the "essential vice, the utmost evil, the complete anti-God state of mind." And yet so many of us are not even aware of its presence in our lives and the potential harm that always accompanies it.
Our lives are so deeply influenced by pride. Though its impact on us is pervasive, let's examine how pride impacts our character, our peace of mind, our effectiveness in our work, and then consider its dark destructive nature.
THE EROSION OF CHARACTER
Albert Einstein believed that the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal was one of the greatest intellects to ever live. Pascal had great insight into the human heart and understood the battles we have with pride. In his great work Pensées he says,
It's the nature of self-esteem and of the human self to love only one's self and to consider one's self alone. But what can a man do? He wants to be great but he finds that he is small. He wants to be happy and finds that he is unhappy. He wants to be perfect and finds that he is riddled with imperfections. He wants to be the object of men's affection and esteem and sees that his faults deserve only their dislike and contempt. The embarrassing position in which he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passion that can possibly be imagined. He conceives a mortal hatred of the truth which brings him down to earth and convinces him of his faults. He would like to be able to annihilate it, and not being able to destroy it in himself, he destroys it in the minds of other people. That is to say, he concentrates all his efforts on concealing his faults, both from others, and from
himself, and cannot stand being made to see them, or their being seen by other people.
Consider what Pascal is saying. We have this great desire to win man's approval and admiration. Therefore we seek to create a picture we want the world to see that impresses those around us. This picture creates the appearance that my life is prosperous, my relationships are flourishing, and I am a highly competent person who has his act together. However, we all know the truth about ourselves. Pascal says that, over time, our lives are riddled with imperfections in that we all have weaknesses, inadequacies, and many types of fears. So what is a person to do? We hide our true selves from the outside world. We fake it. We hide behind smiling, pretty faces that we put on to impress the public.
However, in hiding our true selves, we fail to realize that we become imposters. Life becomes one great pretense, and we do not realize we are guilty of duplicity. Webster's says that duplicity is "a contradictory doubleness of thought, speech or action. It is hiding one's true intentions by deceptive words or actions."
A person who is guilty of duplicity ultimately has little or no integrity. Integrity means to have a unified soul where our thoughts, our words, and our actions are aligned with each other. Therefore, if the pride in our life leads us to be consistently duplicitous in our nature and in our dealings with others, you can see how it will erode our character.
If we cannot be transparent with ourselves and with others, then who are we? Tim Keller says, "All of us, without God's help, live lives of illusion. We spend almost all of our lives trying to prove to other people and ourselves that we are something other than what we really are."
In his wonderful book, Disarming the Secular Gods, Dr. Peter Moore says that arrogant people are narcissists, and they see the world as a mirror. He says,
Coming into a room full of people, they don't see other people with needs, problems, and life experiences to learn from. What they see is an audience, people to impress, to be admired by, and from whom to gain a measure of self-esteem. Because of their underlying insecurity, they will tend to gravitate to those who radiate celebrity, charisma, power, and influence. These are the people who must be impressed and
charmed, and by whom it is essential to be admired. If personal values must be bent in the process, so be it. They are totally subservient to this need. It will be expected that relationships will become manipulative and will be short-lived, because self-absorption prevents them from being truly faithful despite an intent hunger for something lasting and deep.
Dr. Moore is revealing that pride has so impacted us that outward appearance is much more important than inward character. Image rules over substance.
Stephen Covey captured our dilemma when he said, "The effort to put on a front puts one on a treadmill that seems to go faster, almost like chasing a shadow." For so many people it proves to be their undoing. When image and appearance become preeminent in our lives, the heart, the soul, and the character suffer from negligence.
THERE IS NO PEACE FOR THE PROUD
The proud person has a very difficult time finding peace in his life, for he is always worrying what people think about him. Journalist David Brooks of the New York Times believes the proud are unstable because they attempt to establish their self-worth by winning the approval of others, making them utterly dependent on the gossipy, unstable crowd surrounding them. For this reason, the proud person becomes insecure and is robbed of a peaceful heart.
WHEN IMAGE AND APPEARANCE BECOME PREEMINENT IN OUR LIVES, THE HEART, THE SOUL, AND THE CHARACTER SUFFER FROM NEGLIGENCE.
For most of us, life is all about "what I do." This generally is one of the first questions we ask of a new acquaintance. However, life is not only about "what I do" but also about "how successful I am at what I do." Then we naturally bring others into the equation and begin to wonder, "What do
you think about what I do? How do you rate what I do?" It is then only a matter of time before we ask the question, "What if I fail at what I do? What would you think of me then? Would you value me or would you think I'm a loser?"
Fear of failure is one of our greatest fears. It is a psychological death. Bernie Madoff, perpetrator of the largest financial fraud in U.S. history, in his first interview from prison said he was motivated to pull off his grand Ponzi scheme because he feared failure. As he put it, "I did not want to lose the honor and esteem of men." David Sokol was considered by many to be the person who would one day replace Warren Buffett as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway before he was forced to resign because of unethical conduct. Sokol was able to ascend the corporate ladder because of his unbelievable work ethic, largely stemming from his fear of failing. A very wealthy businessman confided in me that every day when his feet hit the floor, he is motivated by one thing: fear of failure. It seems that most of us are not driven to succeed, we are driven not to fail. We are not running towards something positive; rather we are sprinting away from failure.
If we want to change, there are two important questions we should all ask ourselves. How different would my life be if I did not fear failure? And what would my life be like if I did not worry about what people think about me? Not being smothered by worry would change everything because our fear would diminish and we would be able to enjoy peace.
PRIDE AND EFFECTIVE WORK
Pride and arrogance manifest themselves most frequently in the workplace. Our work is clearly visible and easily measurable; for many of us, it is the part of life that lets us know if we are successful. A great deal of comparison goes on in the workplace accompanied by a high fear of failure. At the end of the day, the size of the paycheck reveals a great deal about ability and performance—at least, that is the way most people measure their lives.
What many people do not recognize is how pride impairs our ability to learn, grow, and thrive in our careers, particularly if we are in a leadership role. Arrogant people naturally assume that they know all that is important to know and therefore see no need to learn new things and have no interest
in receiving constructive criticism. Author John Dickson says he sees this happen, particularly at conferences he attends.
Every conference seems to have a Proud Peter. He's the guy in your organization who is moderately talented and charming but whose years in the business have created an inflexibility when it comes to learning from others or implementing changes. His natural wit is able to point out the smallest difficulty with a new idea, and so he quickly convinces himself and sometimes others that the old way—his way— is probably best.
Perhaps it's just my imagination, but I think I can often spot the Proud Peters when I address various audiences. He typically sits in the back with arms folded or behind his head, and throughout the talk he quips to his buddies, who politely smile. He never takes notes—that would be too keen—but he is frequently the first to raise a hand during the Q&A. He might damn the speaker with faint praise or else pose a question designed to sound clever. Afterward in the staff debriefing, I imagine he resists adopting any fresh insights. He is closed to new thoughts (that aren't his own) and rarely submits himself to review or criticism. His pride impedes his progress.
Dr. J.P. Kotter, author and professor at Harvard Business School, has observed: "Arrogant managers can over-evaluate their current performance and competitive position, listen poorly and learn slowly."
The great literary critic G.K. Chesterton was convinced that pride and arrogance were the main causes of human mediocrity, giving us the false belief that we have arrived. As a result, we feel sufficient and think there is really little else to learn.
Pride is particularly destructive to those in high positions of leadership. Several years ago, an article appeared in the Harvard Business Review on why leaders in various business organizations fail. The core data came from a study that revealed the following four primary factors that brought about the failures of those senior leaders:
• They were authoritarian—controlling, demanding, not listening to
others. • They were autonomous—little accountability, aloof, and isolated.
• They committed adultery. • They became more and more arrogant.
I believe the underlying reason these leaders encountered failure can be summed up by these words from the study: feeling and acting as if they were superior to all others. If you think you are superior to everyone in your organization, you will find yourself believing that you can treat people however you want, sleep with whomever you choose, and spend the organization's money at will. Basically, you believe you have free rein to do whatever you want. Senator John Edwards of Virginia confessed to having an extramarital affair with a woman during his campaign. His explanation was, in essence, that he had arrived at a point where he did not think the rules applied to him.
Eight years after publishing his incredible, best-selling book, Good to Great, Stanford professor Jim Collins wrote another insightful book entitled, How the Mighty Fall. He and his team of researchers were seeking to understand the decline and fall of once great companies. They came up with a model that consists of five stages that proceed in sequence as the companies diminish in strength. It is not surprising that Stage 1 is arrogance. People come to regard their company's success as an entitlement, and they lose sight of the true underlying factors that led to the company's success in the first place. They do not seek to continually improve their organization but take the attitude, "We will continue to keep things just the way they are and will continue to be successful because we are such a great company."
Collins shares a great true story of how this can happen:
In the late 1950s, a small, unknown company had a very big idea: "to bring discount retailing to rural and small town areas." It became one of the first companies to bet its future on this concept, and it built a substantial early lead by adopting everyday low prices for everything, not just specific lure-the-consumer items. Its visionary leader created an ethos of partnership with his people, engineered sophisticated information systems, and cultivated a performance-driven culture, with store managers reviewing weekly scorecards at 5 a.m. every Monday morning. Not only did the company decimate Main Street stores in small towns, but it also learned how to beat its primary competitor,
Kmart, in head-to-head competition. Every dollar invested in its stock at the start of 1970 and held through 1985 grew more than six thousand percent.
So, now, what is the company? If you answered Wal-Mart, good guess. But wrong. The answer is Ames Department Stores. Ames began in 1958 with the same idea that eventually made WalMart famous and did so four years before Sam Walton opened his first Wal-Mart store. Over the next two decades, both companies built seemingly unstoppable momentum, Wal-Mart growing in the midSouth and Ames in the Northeast. From 1973 to 1986, Ames's and Wal-Mart's stock performances roughly tracked each other, with both companies generating returns over nine times the market.
So where is Ames at the time of this writing? Dead. Gone. Never to be heard from again. Wal-Mart is alive and well, #1 on the Fortune 500 with $379 billion in annual revenues.
What happened? What distinguished Wal-Mart from Ames? A big part of the answer lies in Walton's deep humility and learning orientation. In the late 1980s, a group of Brazilian investors bought a discount retail chain in South America. After purchasing the company, they figured they'd better learn more about discount retailing, so they sent off letters to about ten CEOs of American retailing companies, asking for a meeting to learn about how to run the new company better. All the CEOs either declined or neglected to respond, except one: Sam Walton.
When the Brazilians deplaned at Bentonville, Arkansas, a kindly, white-haired gentleman approached them, inquiring, "Can I help you?"
"Yes, we're looking for Sam Walton." "That's me," said the man. He led them to his pickup truck, and the Brazilians piled in along Sam's dog, Ol' Roy.
Over the next few days, Walton barraged the Brazilians with question after question about their country, retailing in Latin America, and so on, often while standing at the kitchen sink washing and drying dishes after dinner. Finally, the Brazilians realized, Walton—the founder of what may well become the world's first trillion-dollar-peryear corporation—sought first and foremost to learn from them, not the other way around.
Sam Walton was always worried about Wal-Mart's success. He wanted to instill his sense of purpose and to maintain the humble inquisitiveness that would keep the company on the right path, beyond his own lifetime. Part of his answer to keep the company from becoming arrogant was to hand the company's CEO role over to an equally inquisitive leader, the modest and low-profile David Glass. Most people in the world of business were not familiar with Glass, but he had learned from Walton that Wal-Mart does not exist for the grandeur of its leaders, it exists for their customers. Glass passionately believed in Wal-Mart's core purpose, to help people of average means afford more of the goods previously available only to the wealthy. He was very focused on hiring the best people, building a great culture, and expanding into new arenas, while steadfastly adhering to the principles that made Wal-Mart a great company.
This was quite a contrast to the strategy pursued by Ames. Where Sam Walton engineered a smooth transition to a homegrown employee who understood all of the drivers of Wal-Marts success, Ames brought in an outsider to replace Herb Gilman, their CEO. His replacement, though a very capable leader, moved the company in a different direction as he boldly sought to redefine the company. While Wal-Mart sought to maintain a near fanaticism about its core purpose, values, and culture, Ames did just the opposite, expecting quick growth.
Collins says that arrogant leaders believe that they will continue to be successful no matter what the organization decides to do or not do. It is the humble leader who has a learning predisposition, recognizing there is so much that he and those who lead the company do not know. No matter how successful they become, humble leaders remain students of their work, relentlessly asking questions and always seeking continuous improvement.
THE DARK, DESTRUCTIVE SIDE OF PRIDE
Brian Mahan, a theologian at Emory University, wrote a wonderful book entitled: Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose: The Vocation and Ethics of Ambition. Mahan wrote that we do not often realize there is a real dark side to pride, particularly as it relates to how we compare ourselves to others. He puts it this way:
In American society, individual achievement is supremely important. In itself, this is neither good nor bad. It's merely part of the script. The trouble is that it becomes difficult to assess achievement and monitor happiness without surrendering to the impulse to adopt comparison as a prime measure of individual worth. Some comparisons are harmless enough, and many are, in any case, unavoidable. We take standardized tests. We get accepted or rejected by various degree programs, we accept a job that someone else does not get, and we lose a promotion that goes instead to a colleague. But there is a darker side to comparison. It's the dirty little secret of our society, and we all share in the effort to keep it under wraps. We all know the dark conversations in our hearts, even if only intermittently and selectively, and most of us choose to keep them to ourselves.
You may remember the story of Mark and Lori Hacking. It did not receive a great deal of publicity because Mark Hacking eventually confessed to killing his wife, Lori, and so there was no high profile trial. The story is heartbreaking. The Hackings seemed to be living a normal life together. Mark Hacking, by all accounts, was fun to be around, a loving husband who desired to become a doctor like his father and older brother. However, in the hours when he was supposedly studying for medical exams, Hacking often was hanging out at a neighborhood store, refilling sodas, eating hot dogs, and smoking Camel Menthols. He convinced his wife to pack up and move to North Carolina so that he could attend medical school, where, it turns out, he wasn't even enrolled. He kept textbooks open and spread around his apartment, but in fact, he had dropped out of college long before.
Finally his deception caught up with him when Lori discovered that he was deceiving them all. He had never graduated from college nor applied to medical school. When she confronted him, instead of owning up to it, he made the decision to kill her. His family, of course, was shocked and devastated by this revelation. His father, Douglas Hacking, a prominent physician said, "Mark had two brothers who are high achievers, he felt pressure to excel as well." Brian Hamilton, one of Mark's best friends, put it this way: "Failure was just not an option for Mark."
Mark Hacking compared himself to his older brothers and believed if he were to be a real man, he would need to be a high achiever like them. You can clearly see the dark side of pride demonstrated as this man was trying to
live up to a high standard; and when he could not, he used deception to pretend to be something he was not. As a result of being found out, he was then willing to kill his wife instead of being exposed as a fake.
Several years ago, National Geographic had a four-hour special on 9/11 and the events that led up to it, taking viewers back to when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The head of the Afghan freedom fighters, who were fighting against the Soviets, was none other than Osama bin Laden. What is ironic was the United States was providing him with all types of supplies and equipment at the time. Eventually the Soviets abandoned Afghanistan. Then in 1991, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, which was right on the border of Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden approached the Saudi royal family and asked them to allow his men to defend them against the Iraqis. The Royal family turned him down and instead looked to the United States for protection. Apparently, bin Laden felt humiliated by this refusal. National Geographic points out that this humiliation was the root that led to his hatred of Saudi Arabia and the United States. Clearly, a man's pride is a powerful force in his life, and it makes you wonder how world events have been shaped over the years by pride and arrogance.
It is also amazing how the pride of parents has such an impact on how they raise their children, and what they expect from their children. Sociologist Anthony Campolo wrote in his book, Seven Deadly Sins:
We will never know how many children have had their lives made miserable by being pushed to achievements which makes their parents look good. Children who are driven to psychological exhaustion for academic achievement often know that their labor is primarily to enhance the status of their parents. Behind the claims that the parents expect the children to do well, because success in school will increase their options, is the ugly reality that the achievements of the children visibly demonstrate the superiority of the parents.
Sports are ruined for many teenagers. There is not much fun on most varsity teams because there is a deadly seriousness about the games being played. From Little League through interscholastic sports, the omnipresent parents are pushing their children in order to gratify their own ego needs.
Two years ago there was a very sad but intriguing article in The Atlantic magazine examining why so many teenagers with such bright future prospects were taking their own lives in Palo Alto, California. Palo Alto is located in the San Francisco Bay area. Stanford University is located there, and the city is also headquarters to a number of high tech companies including Hewlett Packard, Loral, Tesla Motors, and Ford Research and Innovation Center. Not surprisingly, Palo Alto is one of the wealthiest cities in the country, and its residents are some of the most well-educated.
WE WILL NEVER KNOW HOW MANY CHILDREN HAVE
HAD THEIR LIVES MADE MISERABLE BY BEING PUSHED TO ACHIEVEMENTS WHICH MAKE THEIR
PARENTS LOOK GOOD.
For this reason, it seems perplexing that in the two high-achieving high schools in Palo Alto, the ten-year suicide rate among their students is four to five times the national average. So many of these suicides are also cluster suicides, which are multiple deaths in close succession and proximity.
Suniya Luther, a psychology professor at Arizona State is quoted in the article and shares her assessment. She says it is not uncommon for children in affluent families to experience a high rate of anxiety and depression. These children feel a great deal of pressure to excel at multiple academic and extracurricular pursuits. They see themselves as catastrophically flawed if they don't meet the highest standards of success.
The source of all this pressure begins of course with the parents. One parent asked after a cluster of suicides, "What are we doing to our kids?" Parents are beginning to recognize that they are to blame for putting excessive pressure on their kids to succeed. Unfortunately, they are having a difficult time letting go of their high expectations to achieve because they believe their children's achievements are a reflection on them.
A great shift has taken place in our country. If you go back 100 years, parents focused on their children's character development. Today the emphasis is placed on their performance, and look at what it is doing to them. This is what pride can do to us and our families.
THE RESULTS OF PRIDE
Tim Keller opens his powerful book, Counterfeit Gods, with these chilling words:
After the global economic crisis began in mid-2008, there followed a tragic string of suicides of formerly wealthy and well-connected individuals. The acting chief financial officer of Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, hanged himself in his basement. The chief executive of Sheldon Good, a leading U.S. real estate auction firm, shot himself in the head behind the wheel of his red Jaguar. A French money manager who invested the wealth of many of Europe's royal and leading families, and who had lost $1.4 billion of his clients' money in Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, slit his wrists and died in his Madison Avenue office. A Danish senior executive with HSBC Bank hanged himself in the wardrobe of his 500-a-night suite in Knightsbridge, London. When a Bear Stearns executive learned that he would not be hired by JPMorgan Chase, which had bought his collapsed firm, he took a drug overdose and leapt from the twenty-ninth floor of his office building.
Most people are quite puzzled over why these talented, well-educated businessmen would take their own lives. The natural response is that they must have been depressed. But why were they depressed?
The answer can be found in one word: shame. They went from being very successful people in the eyes of the world, to being failures, or at least that is the way they saw it. We fear failure because of the shame it generates. Shame is like leukemia of the soul, making us feel as if our lives are worthless and that we do not measure up. Pride devastates clear thinking.
As we have seen, arrogant people seek to be superior to others. Although they believe themselves to be great and powerful, in reality they are crippled with a sense of fear, inferiority, and insecurity. They are extremely needy. They need to feed their egos; they need compliments; they need to be stroked; they need recognition. Though they do not realize it, the proud
are actually quite weak, which causes them to be internally filled with shame.
In our culture, we have somehow come to believe that strong men and strong women don't fail. Our definition of a successful person does not include being down and depressed and therefore when people realize they have a problem, they view asking for help as an admission of weakness.
This is what pride will do to us, and yet we cannot see how it affects our lives. Because of our proud hearts, we all fear shame; when we experience it, we retreat into ourselves, trying to protect our image as strong people. There is always that big question that looms in the background: "What are people going to think of me?"
I have known three men fairly well who tragically decided to take their own lives. Looking back, I am amazed at how similar each of their circumstances was. They were all very well liked with great families, yet each of them struggled with the sense that they were failures in the world of business. They each felt that they did not measure up to other men in our community. In the end, each of them felt that they were insignificant, unimportant, and their lives were worthless because of their inability to perform and achieve in the world of business. Clearly, when a person believes their life is worthless, they lose the will to live.
These tragic events were all triggered by the pride of life, and they help me understand why C.S. Lewis said that "pride is the essential vice, the utmost evil. It is the complete anti-God state of mind."