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I've done this. Don't waste your time. If you'd like to do this in a real way, identify the values in the other person that lead to that trait. Then compare it to your values. Then pretend you're doing it and see what fears come up along the way. Talk to your fears about it and see if there's a way around it -- your fears are a part of you after all. And they're very much able to engage in conversation if you push a little consciousness their way and bring them to more of a conversational and not trauma-time-all-the-time kind of place.
The first approach may seem to work at first and will get you near and close, but not truly intimate with people. It's the loneliest kind of isolation and misery possible -- thinking you're the person that you've aspired to be, but still missing everything.
Learn from my mistakes on this one and please, I'd absolutely encourage that you avoid the author's advice too, if you can help it! :)))) Real and silly > perfect and pristine, any day, not matter what or how the opinions of others strike us (much to the despair of the parts of us that deeply rely on others and the opinions of others for our own self-worth).
Just my two cents! :D :))))
However, there's nothing wrong with genuinely following in the footsteps of someone who has achieved what you want to achieve.
A good example is fitness: If you see a fit person, you can't simply capture the benefits of being fit by drinking the same brand of protein shakes they drink. You have to also do the work, going to the gym regularly and making fitness a priority in your life. Seeing that person as an inspiration can be a healthy way to pave the way to better habits, but it's still up to you to do the work and earn it.
Most Instagram people start by following the template of showing off foods they like, then nice pictures of landscapes. What inspires them is the want to share their appreciation of the world.
Fetishization is when it mutates into the template manifesting into vanity. That your appreciation of the world just turned into mostly selfies of you. Or clinically, that these things are ‘extensions’ of you, which is the laughable clinical explanation of narcissism. It’s standard self absorption. The shrinks that came up with the clinical explanations should honestly be put in jail (DSM) for creating the language of demonization of an evolving personality.
Iterative process for sure.
The analogue in tech is ‘behold me demonstrating this technical how-to in a blog’. Vanity is a real problem in the modern world.
So it brings me to that weird old saying, paraphrasing, ‘the unexamined mind ...’, as in, most of us have tremendous amount of self reflection left to make sense of all that we are absorbing.
Did we really digest it into a good source of nutrients, with a solid chunk of shit pushed out at the end. It’s almost like being a traffic controller in your own digestive system. The curse of consciousness.
The longing to just be a dog, but burdened with the responsibility of humanity (where nothing is every thrown away, and nothing is ever lost on you, and that you accumulated it all into the faintest white tone as not to be noticed, but still incorporated on the white background of the picture).
Maybe I'm too cynical, but my take on it is that most people are already at the vanity/self-absorption phase, the appreciation is lacking, and what's desired most is to be perceived as someone who really appreciates food/beauty/life in general. Or alternatively that they are in some way vaguely unhappy, had expectations of life fed to them by society but they don't quite fit and aren't self-aware or introspective enough to realize it and choose for themselves. And their response is to project back into society the appearance that things fit, both to convince others and to convince themselves. It's especially sad considering that if you found a better fit, modern society is mostly large enough to have a place for it.
The DSM has many flaws, notably being a categorical tautological discretization of some stateful, high-dimensional networked process.
But one thing they do get right is the constancy of causes in the different families of personality disorders. NPD, for example, is not an 'evolving personality', it's only classified as NPD if it's rigid, generally unchanging, and pervasive by its very nature.
Misunderstanding some group of people then claiming action like 'throwing the shrinks in jail' based on that misunderstanding is quite frustrating to me. In addition, the DSM was never meant to be an official manual, just a lingua franca, at least in the early days. You can blame the prevalence of needing discrete billing codes and the stubbornness of the APA to change in more difficult parts of it for its prevalence today.
Please understand the difference between temporary self-absorption and clinically significant chronic self-displacement into secondary, superficial images of self. The first one is growth and struggle, the second is a supremely painful disorder (arguably all of the lack-of-self-love/Cluster B/reactive disorders are, I'd contend).
Right with you on destigmatizing. But that being said, people with narcissistic traits are generally not safe at all, in the least, to be around with any kind of emotional proximity, to be honest as I can with my personal experiences in and around the world. Not that you, or I, or anyone else should stigmatize or hurt anyone on the NPD spectrum 'just because', but I feel very strong that it's basically impossible for anyone on that spectrum to not involve you past a certain point due to the deep desire and need for others for self to feel safe -- that's where I'd argue with the crossover of BPD is with narcissism, although hyperempathetic as opposed to low to literally no empathy at all.
Just my 2 cents, hope this helps clear things up a bit.
Your perception of what makes them fit is incomplete and doesn't translate unless you're at a similar fitness level and are built similarly. There are better ways to get fit than to copy someone you think looks good.
However! I am starting some search through some of the old Taoist traditions and am finding some very good pieces of wisdom (the parable of the horse and the broken leg is quite a good one). The humility in that religion, at least upon surface level (and brief interactions with one Taoist individual) was striking.
I've also heard the stoics are quite good, though I've yet to find a stoic book I can stomach yet that bridges it to the modern day (albeit in a very cursory search). I may have to go back to the old ones.
If you found TSAoNGAF to be appealing, maybe the above would be a good starting place for a journey of your own. I'm just starting mine through those areas, and on the words of other's I've based it on. It's been quite fruitful for me.
My retrospective is that the author just uses his (and others') experiences as examples. But he discusses both his highs and his lows in the book, and as such it really didn't rub me the wrong way at all. Maybe it depends on personal preference (or how inspiring you find the actual content), hard to say.
> I've also heard the stoics are quite good
Maybe that's a path to happiness, but I found the following point of TSAoNGAF to be incredibly enlightening (and, retrospectively, fully in line with my experiences thus far): Happiness stems from the act of overcoming challenges. It is expressly not some state you eventually reach, but a transient in the process of getting somewhere you want to be. Probably the main takeaway from the entire book for me is that the single most important thing for achieving happiness is choosing what problems you are going to deal with day to day. (That's also the deeper point behind the title: Choosing what to give and what not to give a fuck about.) The idea of finding the right mental framing for the world around you instead of letting it rule your emotions is the same as e.g. the parable you mentioned or the stoics (I guess).
Ok, enough of my rambling. If you do read the book (I'm not set on changing your mind) I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on it, and maybe even how the ideas within compare to the ones from Taoism or Stoicism. I'll keep my mind open to the sources you suggested too. :)
Staging a dialog is a framework for thinking that can force expression of otherwise amorphous thoughts. People suggest journaling for a similar reason. Rather than 'forgiving' myself when I repeat the same point in my brain, it is in front of me and instead of feeling like there are 'a million' reasons why not, I can see it is really just three or whatever.
I think my personal (and admittedly strange) experiences have led me to believe that due to some of the inherent structural aspects of personality, as well as some of the dissociative barriers that come up due to past traumas, that it's easy for us to just leave fears in the subconscious and never really address them. For some people, it's more severe than others.
I have a rather extreme version of this due to some complex historical trauma, so 'dialoguing' with myself is... basically a daily occurrence.
The idea of bringing parts of the brain stuck back in trauma to the forefront isn't new or special, necessarily. I do personally find the construct of a casual conversation to be really helpful, though it takes a little bit of wrangling to get to know the parts of ourselves carrying a lot more fear.
For people with more complex trauma, especially developmental, those parts of our heads can turn into individual personalities (DID, 1-2%, or OSDD, about 12-ish percent from what I know). But the same principles hold in subclinical space.
I think stream-of-consciousness journaling is really good for ekeing out those parts of yourself for conversation. Also, just simply talking out loud and switching 'camera view' between the two points of your brain.
The real kicker is when people have lots of really deep and conflicting traumas, coupled with a lot of amnesia in the switching of personality states and etc. That's a really tough one. But I'd reckon for most people, the lighter version of those DID-adapted tools to 'talk to one's self' still works in what I'd consider to be a subclinical (not a doctor or psychologist) presentation of internal dissociation/fragmentation.
There's other 'bits and pieces' of those frameworks scattered throughout the standard psych world that seem a bit strange by themselves -- the child inside, talking to the different parts of yourself, etc. They're all parts of a framework that really does make a lot of sense on the whole once you're able to get it at scale (in my opinion), it's just that the pieces alone admittedly look ridiculous.
If either of y'all want any info on that or have any questions about the exercise (or the above post), just let me know and I'll answer as best as I can. I think the main thing you'd stand to lose is a bit of time and/or personal shame if it went wrong, in which case, you should probably ask the part of yourself that's feeling shame about why they're feeling shame, and resolve the shame there and then as much as possible.
And then you'll hopefully get something either way!
"One of the best known is “Handan xue bu” (“learning to walk in Handan”), which refers to the story of a young man from the provinces who hears that the people of Handan are so sophisticated that they walk in a special way. He goes to Handan to learn, but, years later, he still hasn’t mastered the gait. Dejected, he heads home. He finds that he can’t remember his own way of walking, and has to crawl. The moral: don’t copy others, or you’ll lose yourself."
"All my life I wanted to be somebody, but now I see I should have been more specific." - Lily Tomlin
It is important to try to be yourself, know your strengths and accept your weaknesses. Because if you don't and blindly try to copy others' qualities, you are likely to have a wrong and superficial understanding of the way these traits are acquired. Due to the superficial understanding, the attempt to copy the traits is likely to fail in some cases, and get you crawling desperate about how you could not achieve your target.
Naturally, there is truth on both sides. Maybe the piece advice should have been: *be attentive* to remarkable traits in people around you, then *be inspired* by their good traits and try to avoid replicating their bad traits. The important parts are the self-consciousness and the effort to improve oneself.
The relevant quote (and my favorite quote from it) is:
> Stop trying to be Mark Zuckerberg, because the best you can possibly do is second place.
The point about not being superficial/artificial and instead "just being yourself" sounds fair. To clarify, the copying/imitating I was referring to was much closer to the "imitate, then innovate" sense. That is, even if you make the best attempt to copy someone you admire, you end up with a mutated copy that is uniquely yours (because of your biases and life experience).
And to the point about it being shallow and simplistic — I agree, and the brevity was intentional. I treat this a mental model that is not universally correct, but is sometimes useful. To make sense of the world, I would use an ensemble of these models.
And I love the quotes in the comments!
Things are really just not that simple. You can't for example look at someone and say "Wow, they're really compassionate" and decide that you're going to be compassionate too, if you aren't already. It took a series of experiences, not to mention some mix of biological predisposition, to instill that trait.
Attempting this strategy will just result in a series of shallow parroted behaviors that could actually risk alienating people who end up seeing you as insincere and lacking substance or "courage of your convictions". Traits aren't simply chosen, they are arrived at as the on-going result of an endless process.
Perfectly captures the philosophy, very short, and recommended by many.
-- Burt the Caveman, 19870 B.C.
But the latter point (avoid it) is pretty dangerous, in my opinion. I used to do that, and it resulted in me missing the boat in some really retrospectively stupid ways. Instead, I take a more neutral wait and see approach for most things, reserving my avoidance for things I can tell are wrong.
Neutrality is important. Giving new ideas which aren't fully formed the space to breathe is a key part of any kind of innovation process. Prematurely abridging that in one direction or another can cause unforced errors. That doesn't mean you have to move slowly when you /do/ know. But it does mean that you should be cautious about trying to compress parts of the process which are fundamentally incompressible.
Based on your previous experiences, knowledge and views of the world you might view a trait as bad or good.
Look at the exact same trait 10 years for now and you might realize that now you view it as opposite.
For example the hustle mentality: you see someone who manages to work 12hours per day and be very productive and you might think WOW, that is a good trait, I want that. Then you might later realize that life is not all about working, and that having difference experiences and enjoying life might be a better trait.
Just googling for that proverb gave me a translation that makes much more sense. I don't think Confucius would imitate....
Folks who don't recognize this hierarchy and only try to change matters on one or two of the levels are often setting themselves up for limited success or failure.
It does make for a great self help industry however - telling people they can be so much more, if only they just control those thought patterns via meditation apps, 'clean their room' via Jordan Peterson, etc :)
Even being well kept and dressing tidy is a strategy to signal you’re organized. Some people are naturally organized, and some people aren’t and have to consciously try to do it. I don’t see what difference it makes though.
1) Fall in with a good crowd.
2) We all have a friend we shouldn't have and who is best avoided.
Note to self: avoid it.
Be yourself, not the idea of somebody else.
