To have a good life, you need to be modest. This chapter provides three reasons to do so.
The first reason is that Self-Importance is very tiring because you need to broadcast to the world how awesome you are 24x7. Influencers have to do it. Over the years, the successful financial bloggers we see today ar those who can attract as many eye-balls as they can.
The second reason is self-serving bias. I don't really like the example in the book because it says that self-importance causes some investors to buy sexy companies that improve their self image. I largely disagree because I think even the loudest investors would avoid glamorous stocks because returns on investment is a better long-term way of signalling self-importance.
The last reason is that having a big ego attract enemies. This largely supports my own observations during my legal training.
While I have no problems projecting my sometimes oversized ego, modesty is out of the question for folks who are trainers. If I even project any modesty and play down my achievements, not only would it affect my bottom-line, it would have an impact of the earnings of my business partners who have mouths to feed. This is a natural consequence of our attention driven economy.
Naturally, I have no issues with this because I actually believe that the quality of my life will be much poorer if I have to keep my achievements to myself all the time. I'm just surrounded by assholes who talk about wanting to achieve something and not getting much done almost all of the time. I think a big ego makes failure more painful and pushes a person to deliver on what he says. Otherwise, it's just someone making a lot of bold projections and not following up on them.
So how does this blog try to get ego out of the picture so that other angry Type A people would not come after me with torches and pitch-forks ?
Simple - science the shit out of every assertion you make. Research papers and government statistics give credibility to everything a trainer is saying. So when other high ego guys in the blogosphere wants to disagree, make sure that they have the numbers and studies to prove their assertions.
Sorry, making a rambling post just won't cut it. If you can explain your case properly in good English, as a fellow investors I will examine your criticisms carefully so that I can improve the composition of my own portfolio.
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