How Not To Be Average
Guide to being exceptional
Yesterday I tweeted this:
“Be a paradox—ruthless and kind, disciplined and untamed, humble and proud, dangerous and gentle, skeptical and faithful, proletarian and aristocratic, cold in judgment and warm in affection, patient in strategy and decisive in action, private yet magnetic, ambitious without desperation, powerful without cruelty, civilized without becoming soft, and independent without becoming isolated.”
It went viral.
It also attracted a great deal of criticism, along with many genuine questions about how someone actually becomes this kind of person.
Some people thought the contradictions made no sense.
How can you be ruthless and kind? How can you be humble and proud? How can you remain skeptical while still possessing faith? How can you be private yet magnetic?
The confusion revealed something important.
Most people think a human must be one thing.
You are either kind or cruel. Strong or sensitive. Civilized or dangerous. Ambitious or content. Aristocratic or ordinary.
They have been taught to treat personality as a declaration of allegiance. Once you identify with one quality, you are expected to reject its opposite.
A kind person must never be severe. A humble person must never acknowledge his superiority. A disciplined person must become predictable. A dangerous person must be visibly aggressive. A spiritual person must suppress doubt. An independent person must pretend he needs nobody.
This produces people who are average, normal, or neat but spiritually impoverished.
They are easy to explain.
Easy to anticipate.
Easy to flatter.
Easy to provoke.
Easy to manipulate.
You know exactly how the agreeable man will behave when confronted. He will avoid conflict.
You know how the proud man will behave when criticized. He will defend himself.
You know how the ambitious man will behave when offered recognition. He will chase it.
You know how the cynical man will react to sincerity. He will mock it.
You know how the lonely man will behave when offered affection. He will overlook the price attached to it.
There is no mystery in a person governed by one dominant trait.
There is only repetition.
A paradoxical character is different.
He is difficult to reduce to a sentence because he has developed qualities that appear to oppose one another, yet coexist within a coherent personality.
He can forgive without forgetting.
He can love without surrendering his judgment.
He can listen politely while privately disagreeing.
He can remain calm without becoming passive.
He can be generous without becoming available to everyone.
He can enjoy admiration without becoming dependent on it.
He can walk away from what he still desires.
This makes him difficult to fathom.
And what is difficult to fathom tends to hold attention.
People rarely become fascinated by what they completely understand. Once a person has been fully categorized, curiosity declines. The mind no longer needs to study him. It has already decided what he is.
The mystery disappears.
But when someone contains apparent contradictions, the mind continues returning to him.
Why was he warm yesterday but severe today?
Why does he speak with confidence without constantly demanding recognition?
Why does he appear comfortable among ordinary people yet carry himself like someone belonging to a higher order?
Why can he remain silent in a room while still influencing its atmosphere?
Why does he possess ambition without the nervous hunger commonly associated with it?
Why does he show tenderness without becoming weak?
People talk about those they cannot easily explain.
Not always because they admire them.
Sometimes they criticize them.
Sometimes they distrust them.
Sometimes they project motives onto them.
But they continue thinking about them.
This does not mean you should manufacture eccentricity, behave inconsistently, or create confusion for attention.
Randomness is not depth.
Contradiction without integration is merely instability.
A man who is kind one day and cruel the next because he cannot regulate his emotions is not paradoxical. He is unreliable.
A man who appears humble in public but privately fantasizes about being superior to everyone is not psychologically rich. He is insecure.
A man who constantly changes his beliefs depending on the audience is not mysterious. He is hollow.
The paradox must emerge from control.
You possess opposing capacities, understand both, and deliberately choose the one appropriate to the situation.
That is what gives the character richness.
The undisciplined man is controlled by whatever emotion is strongest in the moment. The integrated man decides which part of himself receives authority.
He may feel anger without allowing anger to determine his strategy. He may feel affection without allowing affection to blind him. He may feel fear without allowing fear to choose his direction. He may desire approval without compromising himself to obtain it. He does not amputate his impulses. He governs them.
This is why “ruthless and kind” is not a contradiction.
Kindness without the capacity for ruthlessness is often not kindness at all. It may simply be fear of conflict wearing a moral disguise. You agree because you cannot tolerate disapproval. You forgive because you are afraid to enforce consequences. You remain available because you fear abandonment. You tolerate disrespect and call it compassion.
True kindness requires choice.
For kindness to mean something, you must be capable of withholding it.
A man who cannot say no is not generous. He is compliant.
A man who cannot leave is not loyal. He is dependent.
A man incapable of aggression is not peaceful. He is harmless.
The value of restraint comes from the existence of power.
This is also why you should be “dangerous and gentle.”
Gentleness becomes beautiful when it belongs to someone who does not need to be gentle.
There is no nobility in helplessness.
There is nobility in strength that refuses to become needlessly destructive.
The dangerous man does not need to announce his danger. In fact, the need to constantly signal aggression often reveals fragility. He does not threaten people over minor insults. He does not turn every disagreement into a contest of dominance. He does not confuse noise with authority. His strength can be felt through the absence of frantic behavior. He knows what he is capable of, which makes public performance unnecessary.
This is what it means to be “powerful without cruelty.”
Power does not necessarily corrupt a man. More often, it reveals the parts of him that weakness prevented him from expressing.
A powerless resentful man may appear virtuous only because he lacks the means to punish those he envies. Give him authority and his hidden bitterness becomes policy. Give him status and his insecurity becomes contempt. Give him followers and his need for validation becomes tyranny.
To possess power without cruelty, you must examine your motives before power magnifies them.
Do you want influence because you want to build something? Or because you want people who ignored you to regret it?
Do you want wealth because you value freedom? Or because you want to make others feel inferior?
Do you want authority because you can accept responsibility? Or because obedience temporarily relieves your insecurity?
A paradoxical man does not deny his darker motives.
He recognizes them early enough to prevent them from becoming his master. He is skeptical and faithful.
He subjects ideas to scrutiny, but does not allow analysis to strip life of meaning. Pure skepticism eventually devours itself.
It becomes incapable of loyalty, reverence, trust, or commitment. Every belief is reduced to a hidden motive. Every act of love becomes chemistry. Every principle becomes conditioning. Every sacrifice becomes disguised self-interest.
The skeptic protects himself from being fooled but may also protect himself from ever believing in anything deeply enough to live for it.
Blind faith produces a different weakness.
It makes a person vulnerable to authority, ideology, charisma, and certainty. It asks him to suspend judgment precisely when judgment is most necessary.
The richer position is to doubt without becoming spiritually empty and to believe without becoming intellectually submissive.
You should be able to ask difficult questions without treating cynicism as intelligence.
You should be able to commit to values while remaining alert to your capacity for self-deception.
You should be humble and proud.
Humility without pride becomes self-erasure.
Pride without humility becomes delusion.
Humility reminds you that you can be wrong.
Pride reminds you that not everyone deserves the authority to define you.
Humility allows you to learn from someone beneath you in status.
Pride prevents you from begging for acceptance from someone beneath you in character.
Humility lets you admit failure.
Pride stops failure from becoming your permanent identity.
The two qualities are not enemies. They correct one another.
You must also be proletarian and aristocratic.
Not in the narrow economic or hereditary sense, but in temperament.
You should retain the ordinary man’s capacity for work, endurance, humor, loyalty, directness, and contact with material reality.
You should also cultivate the aristocratic instincts of refinement, self-command, aesthetic judgment, long-term thinking, restraint, and standards that do not depend on popular approval.
You should be capable of sitting comfortably with laborers without performing superiority and capable of entering sophisticated rooms without becoming intimidated.
You should understand ordinary struggle without glorifying mediocrity.
You should appreciate elegance without developing contempt for simplicity.
The proletarian side keeps you grounded.
The aristocratic side keeps you from becoming spiritually common.
Without the first, you become pretentious.
Without the second, you become crude.
This richness of character cannot be acquired by collecting impressive adjectives.
It must be built through experience.
You become patient in strategy by learning not to react every time your ego is disturbed. You become decisive in action by setting a point after which further thinking is no longer permitted. You become private by resisting the urge to narrate every plan, relationship, injury, and ambition. You become magnetic by learning to communicate with presence when you do choose to appear. You become ambitious without desperation by pursuing what you want while remaining psychologically capable of losing it. You become independent without becoming isolated by developing self-reliance while still allowing trusted people to contribute to your life. You become civilized without becoming soft by maintaining courtesy until courtesy begins to reward disrespect.
The practical method is simple, although never easy:
Identify the virtue you most strongly associate with yourself.
Then examine the weakness that hides inside it.
Perhaps you pride yourself on being compassionate, but your compassion prevents you from enforcing boundaries.
Perhaps you pride yourself on being rational, but rationality has become a way to avoid emotional risk.
Perhaps you think of yourself as independent, but independence has become an excuse to avoid intimacy.
Perhaps you value humility, but humility has become fear of visibility.
Perhaps you value discipline, but discipline has made you rigid, joyless, and incapable of adapting when the system breaks.
Every strength becomes dangerous when it monopolizes the personality.
The solution is not to abandon the strength.
It is to cultivate its counterweight.
If you are excessively agreeable, develop the ability to disappoint people. Begin with small acts. Decline requests without inventing elaborate excuses. Correct someone without smiling to reduce the force of your words. Allow another person to feel temporarily uncomfortable instead of sacrificing your own position to restore harmony.
If you are excessively severe, practise warmth without treating it as surrender. Offer praise without fearing that recognition diminishes your authority. Listen without immediately searching for weakness in the speaker. Help someone without calculating how the favor will be repaid.
If you are too transparent, stop giving everyone complete access to your internal state. Do not announce every grievance. Do not explain every absence. Do not reveal an ambition while it is still fragile. Let some decisions become visible only after they have produced results.
If you are excessively guarded, practise selective openness. Tell the truth to those who have earned it. Permit yourself to be known in places where secrecy no longer protects you and has begun to imprison you.
The goal is not perfect balance.
Balance is often too static a word.
The goal is range.
You need enough internal range to respond to reality rather than mechanically obeying your temperament.
Most people can behave well only when the world cooperates with their preferred identity.
The kind man feels virtuous until someone exploits him.
The confident man feels secure until he is rejected.
The disciplined man functions until his routine is disrupted.
The detached man remains calm until something he truly values is threatened.
The paradoxical man has more than one answer available.
When softness fails, he can become hard.
When force would create unnecessary resistance, he can become gentle.
When visibility would increase his influence, he can step forward.
When attention would compromise his position, he can disappear.
This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is pretending to possess virtues you do not practise.
Range is possessing several capacities and using them consciously.
You are not obligated to present the same version of yourself to every person, because every person does not stand in the same relationship to you. Your child should not experience the same side of you as your enemy. Your closest friend should not receive the same access as a casual acquaintance.
A subordinate should not be treated exactly like a superior. A person approaching you with sincerity should not meet the same defenses as someone approaching with manipulation.
Treating everyone identically is not integrity. It is often laziness disguised as principle.
Wisdom requires discrimination.
You must perceive what the situation is, what the person intends, what response preserves your values, and what response protects your position.
This is where philosophy must become practical.
It is not enough to speak about strength, character, power, discipline, or self-mastery in beautiful language.
You must understand how these qualities operate when someone insults you indirectly, tests a boundary, withholds recognition, attempts to provoke jealousy, offers you responsibility without authority, rewards your competence with more unpaid labor, or disguises exploitation as loyalty.
Character is not what you claim to value while reading.
Character is what remains available to you when the emotional cost of practising your values becomes real.
This is one of the central purposes of Fifty Shades of Sanity: The Forbidden Archive.
The Archive was created for those who want to understand the concealed structure beneath human behavior.
Not only what people say, but what their incentives encourage them to do.
Not only how power appears publicly, but how it operates privately.
Not only how to become disciplined, but how to prevent discipline from turning you into an obedient instrument for someone else’s ambition.
Not only how to attract respect, but how to notice the subtle behaviors that slowly destroy it.
It contains writing on power, status, hierarchy, emotional control, relationships, reputation, discipline, hidden motives, social incentives, manipulation, strategy, and the darker patterns people prefer to deny until they become victims of them.
It is for the person who wants to become less naïve without becoming bitter.
More dangerous without becoming cruel.
More ambitious without becoming desperate.
More private without becoming invisible.
More socially capable without becoming socially dependent.
More powerful without allowing power to make him grotesque.
Most advice tries to make you simpler.
Choose kindness.
Choose discipline.
Choose confidence.
Choose vulnerability.
Choose ambition.
But no virtue survives every environment in its pure form.
Kindness without judgment attracts parasites.
Vulnerability without discrimination attracts opportunists.
Confidence without humility becomes blindness.
Discipline without self-direction turns you into a highly effective servant.
Ambition without detachment makes you easy to control through promises of recognition.
The Forbidden Archive is about understanding the other half of every virtue.
The cost.
The weakness.
The point at which a strength becomes a liability.
The moment at which patience becomes cowardice, loyalty becomes submission, forgiveness becomes permission, privacy becomes isolation, and confidence becomes an inability to learn.
You do not become whole by choosing only the qualities that sound morally attractive.
You become whole by developing the capacities reality will eventually demand from you.
That is what it means to become a paradox.
Not confusing.
Not contradictory for the sake of attention.
Not performatively mysterious.
But too internally rich to be reduced to one role, one virtue, one weakness, or one predictable reaction.
People may admire you.
They may criticize you.
They may debate your motives.
They may misunderstand you.
But they will struggle to dismiss you, because you will not fit comfortably inside the categories they use to make other people ordinary.
Get Fifty Shades of Sanity: The Forbidden Archive here:
Become difficult to define, difficult to exploit, and impossible to reduce to a single dimension.
A truly phenomenal read. Bravo