Are You Balancing What You Want and Who You Serve?

Trying something new: a curated newsletter.

I come across so many great articles, videos, and podcast episodes each week that I want to share with you. Putting this newsletter together for Fridays will allow me to do that.

Plus, the act of summarizing and/or pulling out quotes helps me solidify the lesson I’ve learned.

The post image is from Flickr, taken by Mike Bitzenhofer. It’s called “Balancing Act,” which is certainly appropriate for our purposes here at Primility.

Here’s the image description:

I thought it would be fun to try and balance a dandylion [sic] seed on a nail. Everytime I thought I had gotten it to stay I would exhale and it would blow away. Finally I figured that a little bead of water would help it stay put.

Sometimes, balancing our pride and our humility can feel a bit like trying to balance a dandelion seed on a nail. Primility is like that little bead of water that helps us get there, and helps us stay put — at least for the moment, as we manage our emotions and make our next decision a better one.

Now on to this week’s links …

Balancing Pride and Humility

Gary Vaynerchuck is one of the world’s most successful online marketers. And he knows that his ability to balance ego with humility is a key to his success:

I have a lot of ego around my work ethic, and it’s not hard to see that in the content I create and promote. But on the flipside, I have a lot of humility around the actual brains that go into my decision making. The strategy and smarts I put into my businesses every day are not something that I talk about enough with my community. I disproportionately give credit to the 17-hour work days when working smart in those 17 hours is just as important.

Read: A CEO reveals the one thing that’s more important than hustle when it comes to career success — Business Insider

(Hat tip to Sonia Thompson for posting this in the Primility Facebook Group.)

Michael Port is an author, professional speaker, and entrepreneur. And he cites a particular type of balance as being very important for his success.

As I stand in the service of others, I’m also standing in the service of my destiny. Those two things go hand in hand. And I think that’s very, very important.

Because if it’s just about service, and just about going out and changing the world and there isn’t a driver for you personally in terms of what you’re trying to create for yourself, then it sometimes gets a little bit amorphous, or just extra touchy-feely without actually producing.

And then if it’s all about you, and you’re not trying to make a difference and actually helping people, well then you’re not that appealing to folks and not too many people want to help you.

So I think it’s the balance between those two things.

Listen: An Incredible Sense of Urgency — Hack the Entrepreneur with Jonny Nastor (quote at about the 10:00 mark)

In this week’s Primility Primer, I shared a story from Valentine’s Day weekend (plus some breaking family news!) about a book I found at the perfect time.

Reading this book aloud when Heather and I got home gave me a much-needed reminder about the power of our ideas and, more importantly, about our responsibility to them.

We all owe it to ourselves, to our ideas, and to everyone who might be positively impacted by our ideas to be prideful, because a healthy sense of pride will drive us to believe that our ideas are important, to be grateful for our role as their steward, and to be willing to stand up and share them with others.

Simultaneously, we owe it to ourselves, to our ideas, and to everyone who might be positively impacted by our ideas to maintain our humility, because a healthy sense of humility will drives us to stay mindful of the effort and empathy that will be required to develop our ideas into something that others can understand, relate with, and be moved by.

Read/listen: 091: What Do You Do With an Idea? — Primility Primer

Profiles in Primility

Antonin Scalia might seem like an odd example of Primility.

He was well known for his extreme pride, with humility not often among the words used to describe him. But Scalia balanced the obvious pride he had in his own intelligence and judicial decisions with humility toward the Constitution and the men who drafted it. (He reminds me of John Adams in this way.)

Agree with Scalia or disagree, it’s quite clear that he was committed to doing what he believed would be in the best long-term interests of the United States, based on his interpretation of the original intention of the Founding Fathers — no matter what personal blowback he may have received for doing so.

Read: The Remarkable Life of Antonin Scalia — The Atlantic

Primility Potpourri

The process of dating and determining who to settle down with is difficult. Tremendous leaps of faith are required. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a formula to guide us (kind of like how Primility helps to guide our decisions)?

Turns out, there is … and it’s all about balance.

You need some kind of formula that balances the risk of stopping too soon against the risk of stopping too late.

Read: When to stop dating and settle down, according to math — The Washington Post

When it comes to making your next decision, remember that it’s often decisions of inaction that we regret more than decisions to take action. Unfortunately, our mind likes to confuse this in the moment. 🙂

When you think about going out there into the world with something new or original, it’s easy to imagine getting embarrassed, it being rejected, looking stupid. And so a lot of people say, ‘Well, I’m not going to do it because I don’t want to regret that. But if you look at the research on this, in the long run, the regrets that we have are the inactions, not the actions.

Listen: How to Turn Your Idea Into a (Successful) Business — Adam Grant on the James Altucher Show (quote at 21:00 mark)

Here is an interesting, unintended explanation of one form of primility — the pride we take in the accomplishments of the people we are close to:

It’s bizarre to take pride in something that you had nothing to do with — it might even be some form of delusion — but I liken it to the pride you take in the success of a family member. When you have a connection to someone (even an imaginary one) whose roots predate their success, you’re free to be flat-out happy for that person without the nattering pettiness that plagues shakier relationships.

Read: Dear Katie Nolan … — by Bill Sheahen, Medium

Thank you for reading. Have a great weekend.

Stay cognizant of your pride and humility so that you can better manage your emotions and make your next decision a better one.