6.g 停止自卑

Make Time Your Friend 6.g: Stop Feeling Inferior

> By Li Xiaolai · 2008-05-19 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113114045/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/455.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

Everyone has a "wished-for self," and at the same time a "perceived self."

> "Wished-for self" = "real self" = "perceived self"

seems to be the ideal state. However, the usual situation is far from this. In fact, much of the time, if a person is in the state of

> "Wished-for self" ≈ "real self" ≈ "perceived self"

that's already relatively very happy. More people, in some respects, are more likely to be in this state:

> "Wished-for self" ≠ "real self" ≠ "perceived self"

And so life is full of distortions of one kind or another, even extremely strange ones. And such distortion often makes us make baffling decisions or choices that go against reason, while time doesn't care at all whether anyone's choices or decisions are rational; no matter what, it passes as it always has.

Almost all possible distortions come from that so-called "perception" which is in fact the least reliable, yet which we must rely on. Our "perception" is very inaccurate, and especially easily influenced, and even most likely to be misled. The most obvious example is the magical magic tricks we love. All magic tricks achieve their magical effect by way of, and by exploiting, the flaws or blind spots of our perception.

Outward appearance, that is, looks and figure, is the aspect in which a person most easily develops a distorted perception of himself. The reason is simple: of the differences between people, the most easily distinguished is outward appearance. But in perception, the truth is not so easily obtained. Because in the process of judging outward beauty, everyone is more or less influenced by "compensatory psychology." For example, a fat man is often more likely to like so-called bony beauties, and a thin woman is often more easily drawn to men of sturdy build. One of the interesting phenomena this distortion directly produces is that in celebrity circles, among those generally considered outstanding in looks, the difference between so-called "beautiful" and "ugly" is no smaller than among so-called ordinary people, and may even be larger.

If a person really is handsome and he himself also thinks he's handsome, then when his "perceived self" equals, or approximately equals with very small error, his "real self," people may say he's very confident, and he himself will also feel very confident. However, if his "perceived self" far exceeds his "real self," people will judge him "conceited," and he may, because of this error of perception, pay more or less some price he can't imagine in other areas.

When this person's looks are above the average level, usually he won't easily feel inferior because of it, and his "wished-for self," even if it may exceed his "real self," is often not worse than his "perceived self."

But if this person's looks are below the average level, usually he is quite likely to feel inferior because of it, and his "wished-for self" is even more likely to far exceed his "real self." And the "real self" will always correct the "perceived self" in various ways—although he himself may consciously or unconsciously reject this correction. So the "perceived self" is limited, while the "wished-for self" has no best, only better; the difference between the two forms a very large negative value—and inferiority is formed.

If only it were this simple.

First, as a member of the whole society, most people don't realize that sometimes the ideas the whole society instills in them may be wrong—in fact they often are wrong. The reason is especially simple too: everyone perceives this world through his own perception; and we just mentioned that "perception" itself is very inaccurate, especially easily influenced, and even most likely to be misled. Obviously, the ideas of the whole society are merely a combination of the ideas of the great majority of people, and can't help containing uncorrected, crude and distorted so-called "true perceptions."

In almost all societies, perhaps what is most harmful to each individual's mental health, coming from the whole society, is the definition of "inferiority." In all times and places, in almost all societies, "inferiority" has been defined as negative, "confidence" as healthy, and "conceit" also as negative. Actually, imagine: in a society where "perception" is naturally accurate, "inferiority," "confidence" and "conceit" would all be unnecessary concepts. Yet the reality is that we live in a world naturally distorted by the very nature of "perception."

For the sake of our own mental health, much of the time we really do need to disregard, even ignore, the ideas the whole society instills in us—because much of the time they are nothing but "the whole society's distorted perception." So I've said countless times in class that feeling inferior is not a flaw. When you should feel inferior, feel inferior; that's what's normal. If you never feel inferior even at all the times you should, then you have a living-fossil reference—Sister Furong (芙蓉姐姐). [Translator's note: Sister Furong was a Chinese internet celebrity of the mid-2000s, widely mocked for her boundless self-confidence about her looks.]

Second, in many years of teaching and a great many exchanges with students, I've repeatedly found the same phenomenon: the more outstanding a person is, the more easily he feels inferior. It's just that these people, precisely because they are outstanding in some other respects, are all the less willing to show it, and others, likewise because they are outstanding in some other respects, think they must surely be very confident.

But in fact that's not so. Let's suppose someone—let's call him A—is very outstanding. Then one thing is easy to imagine—A, like everyone, is unlikely to be perfect. More likely, A is very outstanding in some respect, while in other respects he is not very outstanding, or just average, or even below average.

But the problem is that outstanding people often set their standards for themselves too high, even taking it for granted that they should be quite outstanding in every respect. So the very outstanding respect A has (let's suppose he could score 99 on a 100-point scale), compared with the average respect he has (65), shows too large a gap—a gap of as much as 34 points.

And another person not so outstanding—let's call him B—in a respect that for him is fairly outstanding (80), compared with another average respect he has (60), has a gap of only 20 points. So, in terms of self-satisfaction, the more outstanding A has to bear a bigger drop than B; if only the drop itself is considered, then the more outstanding A will feel more pain, although he is in fact better than B in every respect.

From this angle, it's rather those whose aptitudes are at the average level in every respect who are less prone to feeling inferior. Generally speaking, a person can't be all that bad, because being bad to the extreme is no less difficult than being strong to the extreme. So people whose aptitudes are near the average level, from the standpoint of probability, have almost no chance of meeting an extremely large drop.

So, entirely from the standpoint of her own feelings, Sister Furong has no reason at all to feel inferior. From an objective standpoint, Sister Furong's confidence or conceit actually has nothing at all to do with anyone else either. But the problem is that it actually provoked anger—so who on earth is feeling inferior? The people angered by Sister Furong may be thinking this—I haven't done anything (and I reckon I'm much better than you), so what gives you the right to jump out?!

That's where the crux lies: is the standard for measuring confidence and inferiority within oneself? Or should others be taken as the reference? In fact, it should be neither within oneself nor with others as the reference. The distinction between beauty and ugliness, the difference between strong and weak, the gap between clever and stupid do not exist dependent on individual thoughts, nor will they change in any way because of anyone's own view.

The analysis is clear enough, but what's the solution? The answer is that to reach the healthy state of being neither elated by things nor saddened by oneself, the first thing to learn is: **stop mocking others**. In life we seldom really meet situations where others' "weakness" affects our "strength." More often, mocking others as "weak" is just a way of proving one's own "strength," but real "strength" needs no proving; "strength" that needs proving is actually just "weakness" clearly proven by oneself. The feeling of "strength" gained by mocking others is bound to be far from the "real self"; what one gets is merely "conceit" in others' eyes, and the "confidence" one feels is merely a distorted and serious illusion. So, observing carefully from a third party's standpoint, the outcome we see is always: mocking others in the end brings only harm to oneself—often all-round harm from every angle.

Those who mock others will in the end inevitably be mocked by others, or by people other than those others. It's simply a vicious curse. In my own experience there was a situation very similar to this. In college, who knows why, a low game was popular in the boys' dorms: pulling down underpants. At the slightest excuse a group of people would, for baffling reasons, gang up on some boy and attack him together, until in the end that boy's lower body was naked and he was unbearably ashamed. At that time (the early nineties), our dorm had 12 people in all, me included, and I was the only one who never took part in this game even once. Even when all of them, including the one who'd been stripped, were roaring with laughter, I couldn't even laugh, perhaps because I really couldn't see what was fun about it. After graduation, one day it suddenly occurred to me that in the whole dorm I was the only one who had never been stripped, and nobody had ever made such an attempt on me. Apart from me, everyone had been stripped. Our dorm's number three, because he was the strongest, never "lost his virtue" in four years. However, in a flash four years had passed and it was the last day, and of course his integrity didn't survive to the end—ten people surrounded him together. Ten seconds later he said, "Can't I just do it myself?" The answer he heard was "Of course not!" Five minutes later, after being stripped stark naked, he was locked outside the dorm door. This experience has benefited me all my life. Nothing could tell me more clearly why that ancient precept is right: "Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself."

Another, somewhat more technical means is: **forget your own strengths**. This is a somewhat exaggerated way of putting it, because forgetting is hard to do, especially when what's to be forgotten is strengths. However, this is not only reasonable but necessary. The right way to overcome inferiority is certainly not "forgetting your shortcomings"; at the very least it should be "overcoming your shortcomings." Because there are many so-called shortcomings that can't possibly be overcome. If ugly looks can, at a stretch, be fixed by spending some money on plastic surgery, what about a short, stocky build? In any competitive activity, if you've prepared too little in advance, and your heart muscle isn't strong enough and your lung capacity relatively poor, how can you improve your psychological quality merely by "taking deep breaths"? So those "how to overcome shortcomings" spiels are not only stupid but even laughable.

Actually, to put it precisely, "disregarding your own strengths as much as possible" is enough. In a society where "inferiority," "confidence" and "conceit" are almost all defined in a distorted way, the most direct benefit "disregarding your own strengths as much as possible" brings is that you'll be drowned in praise, because you're so "modest," so "low-key." Actually, you haven't done anything; you've merely done something all mature people are good at—mature people always know how to make others comfortable. Much of the time, so-called "modesty" and "low-keyness" are in fact an optimized strategy of self-protection.

However, the significance of "disregarding your own strengths as much as possible" isn't limited to this. If you can control your feelings and deliberately manage to "disregard your own strengths as much as possible," you'll find another important change in yourself: the drop between your strengths and shortcomings has been reduced by you, artificially and at the same time naturally—a seemingly contradictory but very reasonable result. This reduction in the drop is bound to ease your unnecessary pain.

There's another rather good means, which comes from a friend of mine. Her method is **in your own language, to replace the two words "strength" and "shortcoming" with "trait."** When teaching composition classes, I often tell students, "The language we use limits our thinking." For example, in the stock market, people often lose large fortunes because they use the wrong words when thinking. When the price of the stocks an investor holds falls, the word they should originally use to describe [Translator's note: the original has a stray 于 before 缩水的市值, which makes no sense here; translated by the intended sense] the shrunken market value is "paper loss," not "loss" or "actual loss." But some people, untrained in thinking, use the word "loss" or "actual loss" when describing the shrunken market value, and so, unable to bear the psychological pressure (actually scaring themselves), sell the stocks in their hands—and the "paper loss" really becomes an "actual loss." Conversely, in some other situations, some people mistakenly think an "actual loss" is only a "paper loss," and miss their chance to reduce their losses. So I think this friend's method is one of the most ingenious yet most direct, fundamental solutions I've seen. Because you no longer use words like "strength" and "shortcoming" that obviously carry praise or blame, and instead use the completely neutral "trait," it becomes easy to treat your own various traits calmly, and at the same time to treat others' various traits calmly too. Moreover, there's deeper thinking behind this method. Because much of the time, so-called "strengths" and "shortcomings" are relative. "Naughty" little children, even if teachers don't like them, can't be denied to be more creative; daring to take risks, on the battlefield or in the marketplace, may make one a hero or a martyr; people called "chatterboxes" may be rather annoying ordinarily but are relatively more gifted as teachers.

The last method is: **indulge yourself a bit, appropriately**. Admitting that you are a person with shortcomings is an important precondition for the mind to gain liberation. The truth is, whoever has no shortcomings isn't human. Earlier we said that feeling inferior was originally just a normal feeling, merely defined as negative. By the same reasoning, if we think seriously, we'll find that even so-called "vanity" is the most natural of wishes for everyone, yet is likewise defined as negative. Actually, as long as you don't hurt others or damage others' interests, there's no need to be too demanding about your own shortcomings. So what if you "feel inferior" for a bit? So what if you're "conceited" for a bit? So what if you're "vain" for a bit? If merely because you "felt inferior" for a bit, were "conceited" for a bit, or "vain" for a bit, the people around you got hurt, then actually the problem isn't you, it's them—they're too fragile.

All the methods take a bit of time and energy to carry out correctly. Take out a sheet of paper and a pen and make lists. On the left, list your strengths; on the right, list your shortcomings—spending a whole day on it isn't excessive, because you need to tell "Is this really my strength?" and "Is this really my shortcoming?" Then try to guess how others view your strengths or shortcomings. You can even find out in a roundabout way—I believe that, like every one of us, you'll be surprised again and again, even struck dumb. In this process, what you accomplish is: understanding your "real self" and your "perceived self," and the difference between the two, and even "yourself in others' eyes." Then carefully examine your shortcomings: could any of them actually hurt others? If so, please find ways to overcome them. Everyone surely has some "harmless shortcomings"—indulge yourself a bit in those respects, appropriately; believe me, such "appropriate indulgence" is a huge help to you in overcoming the "shortcomings that might hurt others."

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