You Ain't Shit

You are the most worthless, insignificant piece of crap in the world. Nobody cares what you do, nobody cares about your accomplishments, and nobody cares about how important you think you are. You and your inflated sense of self-importance are a pimple on the ass of anything that matters in the world. You could die tomorrow and everyone would forget who you were within a week.

Let’s start there.

I have had a number of friends blow themselves up over the years with their enormous egos, and I have others who are working on it. This is how it goes: you do your job, you get better at it, you run across a little success, you find yourself in the top tax bracket, and then you are strutting around like a peacock, thinking you know what’s best for you and everyone else. I know, because I’ve done it. Sure, I had a pretty big job, running the ETF desk at Lehman, and I was getting paid pretty well ($850,000 in 2008 dollars, which is about $1.3 million in today’s dollars), and I thought I was king shit. When I got my bonus in 2008, I was making an exorbitant amount of money at age 33, and I thought I was worth more. Now, this is a very common phenomenon on Wall Street, people fighting over money and such, but somewhere along the way I lost track of the fact that just a few years prior, I was sitting in a psychiatric ward looking for my shoelaces.

Your ego is the enemy, and a hyperactive ego can take you to zero. Now, it took me a long time to learn that. I was reared on a diet of Ayn Rand, which is not necessarily prejudice and misinformation, but Ayn Rand is a big fan of the ego and egoism. And yes, it does take a little bit of ego to succeed in business—the ability to say I am worth it and build something spectacular beyond your wildest dreams, to think big and execute on it. It’s hard to do that without an ego. But once you accomplish that, you are not special. Yes, you have created jobs, yes, you have created wealth, but you are nothing more than just another bozo on the bus. Likely you have some sort of psychological disturbance of some sort, an addiction to drugs or porn or gambling, or some sort of selfishness and dishonesty in one corner of your life, and the reason I say this is because we all do. We are human beings, and as human beings, the thing we have in common is our humanity. We are imperfect. So if you are going to lord over people because you made a little money this year, then you are setting up for a fall.

I am familiar with ego in the Wall Street milieu, but it happens around here in South Carolina, too. True story: I was in Ruth’s Chris a few years back (my first mistake) and some guy sent his steak back to the kitchen three times because he was dissatisfied with it. I know what you’re thinking: who was this guy? I’ll tell you who he was: a thirty-something white guy who looked like he just tumbled out of the Brooks Brothers outlet who probably made $150,000 for the first time in his life. There are those types around here, marketing managers at restaurant chains or hotels making low six figures who go to the Chamber of Commerce functions with their name tags and chicken on a stick, basking in the power and glory of the business community in…Myrtle Beach. Knew a guy around here who started making $300,000 and he blew himself up, too. This was years ago. Funny how a little money can go to your head, and I mean a little money. I have made some money in my life, and I do my best to stay grounded and treat others with respect, even if I am not terribly loquacious. You constantly have to be telling yourself, you ain’t shit, you ain’t shit, until you internalize it, and one day, you can be Pat Sajak, beloved by all, making $15 million a year, and realizing that you are…a game show host, and keeping your ego right-sized, and holding onto that job for 41 years. Pat Sajak is probably the best game show host of all time, but he is also a humble servant.

Funny, because as you probably know, I have a big DJ gig coming up in Las Vegas, playing in Omnia, opening for Zedd, and I think 18 years ago I would have visualized myself jumping around like an idiot and doing Jesus poses, being a complete attention hog, and these days, I am just going to go push some buttons and play some music. I am a humble servant—my job is to set the vibe for the party. Nothing more. Yes, opening for Zedd at Omnia is a pretty big deal. But I ain’t shit. That doesn’t mean I won’t post pictures and video online—I’m proud of it and it’s good marketing—but I’m not going to be strutting around like a peacock for the next six months. And if they tell me to take the energy up or take the energy down, I will do it. I’m have no ego about it.

Funny, because this comes up in the writing world, too. You write a book and you send it off to the editor. The editor has all kinds of suggestions and comments. With Street Freak, I was incensed. How dare they! My writing is perfect! These days, I pretty much just go through the document and accept, accept, accept all the changes unless I really feel strongly about something. The editor knows better than I do. When I went to AWP a couple of years ago, I spoke with an editor of an short stories anthology and he asked if I was okay with being edited. Of course I am, why? I have no ego about it. He said, you’d be surprised, a lot of people get bent out of shape about being edited. I’ve been an opinion journalist for seven years, and occasionally I will get edits that make the article worse, in my estimation, but I just accept it and move on. All the pain in my life comes from when I am resisting.

But really what I’m talking about is when someone goes from making a little bit of money to a medium amount of money, and their ego goes through the roof, and they turn into Mr. Bigshot, just generally being an asshole and impossible to deal with. I have seen this over and over again in my lifetime. I saw it plenty on Wall Street, but I’ve seen it happen outside of Wall Street, too. This is why most people shouldn’t win the lottery, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago. This is how you end up spending multiple five figures in a strip club. Heard that story, too. We are all capable of it, from traders to marketing managers to sociology professors with two nose rings. Money has an intoxicating effect. Suddenly, you have so much that you don’t know what to do with it, and it piles up in snowdrifts.

You want to know what the antidote to this is? Go to a prison, a detox, or a psych ward. Or, at a minimum, call up one of your friends who is suffering at the moment, and ask how he is doing. Don’t offer a solution—just listen. I mean, look—I hope everyone who reads this newsletter someday becomes fantastically successful. I hope your money piles up in snowdrifts. But it is imperative to stay grounded, and never forget where you came from. That doesn’t mean you have to give all your money away. That doesn’t mean that you have to give any of your money away. That means that when you are out to lunch and the waitress brings you your chicken salad deluxe, you look her in the eye and treat her as an equal, and then be generous, but not to the point of being obnoxious, because that’s ego, too. She probably has some crisis in her life that you don’t know about, a screaming kid, a philandering husband, sick parents, and you want to have empathy and treat her as a human being for perhaps the first and only time in her day. The foregoing also applies to anyone you come in contact with, including the chick with purple hair at Starbucks, who you have nothing in common with. But you do—we have our humanity in common.

You have to believe me on this. Ego will end your career, end your marriage, and imperil every relationship that you have. You’re not “too good” to be doing anything. In the unlikely and unhappy event that I am financially ruined, I would flip burgers for a living and make the best of it. I am not above that, or anything else. Your ego is not your amigo. You may think you are important, but in the grand scheme of the universe, you ain’t shit.