So I've been thinking about this topic for quite some time now...selfish. If I had a dollar for every time a woman in my life called me that I'd, well, at least be able to buy myself a good dinner. It's not like I didn't warn them. Throughout my entire athletic career I was a selfish person, I had to be. My training and my ambition demanded it. "What time do I have to eat"; "What time do I have to train"; "What can I drink, what can't I drink"; "What time do I have to go to sleep"...and so on and so forth is the way of the high performance athlete, and thus the life of all people closely connected to that athlete. Oscar Wilde's definition is very intriguing and it says "Selfish is not living the way one wishes to live, it's asking others to live the way one wishes to live."That is a very important statement- asking/demanding others to live the way I lived is something that I did constantly. Not worrying about others lives was something else that happened along the way to Olympic Gold. Not disregarding their lives or not caring, but not letting others lives distract me from my goals. What really has triggered me to start this blog and eventually want to write a book on this topic was something that happened to me 4-6 years ago. Six years ago I was dating an amazing woman. In her house was a book she had slowly been plodding along reading...reading whenever her and I weren't together- which during the off-season was not very much. The book was titled "Under the Banner of Heaven" and it's a very popular book. It sat there in her house for quite some time and she told me she had been reading it. That was about all I knew about the book at the time.
A couple of years later, not too long after we had broken up, I saw the book at a book store. Curiously, I picked up the book and read the back cover. Do you know why I read the back cover? Because I didn't know what the book was about. It was a book that someone I had dated and loved for over two years had read and I never thought to ask her what it was about, if she was enjoying it or what it made her think of. I didn't ask not because I didn't care. Not because I didn't care about her or what she was doing- it just never occurred to me. It never occurred to me to ask. It dawned on me at that point what selfish was...and it took me another few years to see how it affected every aspect of my life.
Selfish can be a very, very bad thing. It can be an impartial thing. It can also be a wonderful thing. It can drive people to do simultaneously destructive and productive things. Through this blog, and your comments and feedback, I plan on exploring how selfish affects us all and how it affected the success I had in my life, along with the disappointments. I want to look at how we define it, why it happens and how others utilize it in their lives; at how selfish drives success and how very selfish people can turn to lives of giving to others and ultimately look at the roots of that giving.
I'm excited for this to be an open forum on the topic and hear what you have to say about what myself and others post.
Ultimately- once we realize we are selfish, is it still ok to act that way?
I think everyone has a natural tendency to be selfish. For some it is more pronounced than others. I think it is very easy to be inward-looking, to promote our own self-interests in our pursuit of own success and recognition. I think selfishness is what our human natures default to if we do not purposefully and deliberately train ourselves to show love to others.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree Laura, very well said. I think that is a big part of what I want to look at- breaking that selfish cycle. For myself I can look back and see that maybe I could have done things differently and still have been just as successful, if not more. Being selfish was an easy excuse. Thus the question at the end of the the first blog- once we realize we are selfish, is it still ok to act that way?
ReplyDeleteIn film school we called this "persistence of vision" in reference to the focus that a movie director has to maintain throughout the filmmaking process in order to avoid distractions and deliver a movie that truly represents his/her point of view.
ReplyDeleteI think anyone in any field, who goes after a goal passionately, has to have some degree of selfishness.
Perhaps a bigger question is what effect do digital media have on our collective and individual "selfishness." The very terms coined to refer to these media, iPad, iBook, iMac, it's all about "I"/me, me, me, Facebook and Twitter are all about the self and self-expression, messages in adverstising are all about personal pleasure (McDonald's "I'm lovin' it", TimeWarner Cable "The power of you", etc.), popular entertainment is all about self promotion (American Idol, the Kardashians, and most other reality shows)...
Does this hyper self-focused media landscape exacerbate our natural tendencies for selfishness to such a degree that it ends up being all consuming?