Level 1

Confident and Arrogant I May Be

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=431

http://www.communicationconfidence.com/confidence-vs-arrogance.html

http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/personal-effectiveness/6334-confidence-vs-arrogance.html

First notes first.

If you like me, or generally agree with my point of view, this post will appear to you as an honest observation of a current social paradox and will let my self-confidence show.

If you dislike me, or generally disagree with my point of view, this post will appear to be a very arrogant and self-righteous piece of self-promotion.

At this point, if you currently still have no opinion of the two statements above, you probably do not feel that I am being too arrogant yet.  But if you already think I’m being arrogant, then there’s not much I can do.

Just pointing this out may be arrogant to you.

And acknowledging the fact that the above could be arrogant may seem arrogant.

And that above statement may also seem arrogant.

And so on.

And so on.

And doing all of that may seem arrogant.

Next note.

The reason why stereotypes exist is because to a certain extent, they can be observed in life.  People think Jews are smart but stingy and that Asians have small eyes because they are observable patterns that we see.

In the same way, the plethora of Internet articles on confidence v. arrogance shows that this distinction is indeed a difficult one to understand and that many people are trying to figure it out.  If this topic were not so important, you would not see so many sources of information.

Do your own research and draw your own conclusions, but basic tenets that I have found include this.

Obviously, confidence is positive and arrogance is negative.  Both allow the “experiencer” to gain self-esteem and a feeling of success.  HOWEVER, arrogance specifically targets the less successful and treats them badly, or quickly finds faults with the more successful and tries to pull them down.

Confidence, on the other hand, allows competition to exist and admits that all people have their strengths and weaknesses.

Raw personal esteem energy, if projected, makes a person appear arrogant if that person has done something the observer has not, or makes a person appear arrogant simply because the observer dislikes the other person.  Example: liberals and conservatives.  Both view the other side as very arrogant.

The person appears confident, however, if the observer likes the person or if that person is actually less successful than the observer feels s/he is.

These factors change over time, of course, and they are directly connected to the actions of the person being observed, so that person does have some control over whether s/he is projecting confidence or arrogance.

However, just as bullying is defined from the viewpoint of the receiver of the action, rather than the bully, the observer also plays a key role in determining whether the raw personal esteem energy is actually confidence or arrogance.

This energy is unbelievably critical to success.  Those people who lack it fall into depression quickly, due to “low self-esteem”, a point where they don’t have confidence or arrogance.  Corporations facing competitors must maintain personnel morale (energy) or else they will be completely squelched.

I’m just giving you my personal experience.

And this all seems fine and dandy.

Yay.  Problem solved, everybody go to being confident now.  Help other people, confidence.  Hurt them, arrogance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_exclusive_events

How exactly do you not hurt people in competition?  If you “do better” than other people, they are necessarily “doing worse” than you.  Therefore, they are being harmed.  So they view you as, no surprise, arrogant.  Arrogant for what you think is your confidence, the energy that you used to get yourself to that pinnacle of success.  What do you do?

You can try to maintain relations, allow negotiations, and so on.  But at a certain point you become so powerful that you really don’t care about those other people.  So what if I think Bill Gates is arrogant?  You know what?  He DOES NOT CARE.  AT ALL.  If this weren’t America he could have me killed for no reason.

Of course, this is a pretty extreme example; most of your everyday life experiences will not place you in this situation.  So it’s a tough distinction to make.

I’d like to share with you my beautiful writing skills from 7th grade

I may have jumped into social networking sites late, Facebook being the first one I ever used, with an account created during the summer before freshman year of high school.

But.  The concept of sharing experiences came to me independently!  Or so I’d like to think.  Starting in 7th grade, I began to write lots of e-mails and distribute them within my circle of friends.  The e-mails were kind of like blog posts, or whatnot.

Eventually my friends convinced me to switch to a networking site.  And there ended my early writing adventures.

Well, without further ado, here is an early e-mail “post” I wrote about my adventures going to and coming back from the Walt Disney World Resort (but not the actual time I spent there.  Weird, huh?)

***

12/30/06

Hello!!!!!!!  Happy holidays!

Sorry if you haven’t heard from me for a week, but I was in Florida!

But before I start, allow me to tell John that my LPS running on Chinese is worse than his.  (LPS is language processing system).  I probably got 35% of all of those words.  Download English!!!!!  Thank you.

And now my brother is three years old, but I’ll be telling you about that later.

By the way, since I am in Road Scholar for S.O., prepare for a lot of highways.

Okay.  Get ready.

We left on the 22nd, a Friday.  The 21st was a very busy day, and my dad claimed he had to work overtime.  Obviously, since we were packing everything we needed, we needed all the help we could get.  So my mom got really angry and started shouting.  As my little brother put it, “ma ma ma ba ba!”, or “mom is yelling at dad.”
Well, everything got packed anyway, and mom said to me (in Chinese), “Okay, Michael, we need to leave really early tomorrow, at six.  What did you set your alarm clock to?”

My answer (English), “Five Forty-Five.  PM.  JUST KIDDING!”

I slept.

Now, I have a problem with getting up, and every time I wake up to go to school I have to really force myself.  Usually it’s because I go to bed late.  Plus, my dad came home around three AM and he made sure everything was packed, so he went to bed late, and mom has some trouble sleeping, so she fell asleep late and didn’t sleep much.  The alarm went off at 5:45, I hit snooze and turned of the alarm, and the next thing I knew, it was eight in the morning.  AND neither of my parents were up.

Okay, well, before we left the house at nine, my dad got out of the driver’s seat, and ran to the door that connected the garage with the house.  He usually does this before long car trips, and each time, mom gets angry, or as my brother puts it, “ma ma ma ba ba!”

Mom asked him (Chinese) “What are you doing?  Going to pee?” and my dad responded with “Yes”.  But he never got into the house, so I really have no idea what happened.

Okay, so, dad got us onto I-77 S.  And we drove.  And drove.  And drove.  To pass the time, I read Dan Brown’s Deception Point until, of course, I finished it.  By that time we had almost crossed the Ohio River to get into West Virginia.

And then I felt it.  Pressure in my lower abdomen…getting stronger…and stronger…

PPPSSSSSSSSSS.

Aaaahhhh.

You know the saying, silent smells worse than noisy?  Well, on the way down I-77 S AND I-95 S, it proved itself true, even though if you push hard enough I guess you’ll make noise, which you shouldn’t do because those usually precede a bowel movement, and you don’t want doo-doo in your pants.

Dad sniffed the air.

(English) “Waaaaa, Michael, did you fart?”

I said no.

Dad opened the window anyway, and air from outside rushed in, relieving the smell.
And so it went.  Pretty much at every five minutes, I farted, and all the windows were opened.  My brother even learned to say “cho cho qi ba!”, or “clean the air.”

Well, my brother still takes naps, and he dozed off around 2 PM.  Mom usually dozes off with him.

Dad’s average speed was about 12 mph above the speed limit for the whole trip.

Did I mention that it was raining and visibility was low?  And dad was still going 80.  Wow.

Well, for that calculation, I took out the traffic jams.  Yeah.  There were four of them, and one hindered movement along I-26 E in South Carolina so much we were probably stuck for 90 minutes.  All of the traffic jams probably added three hours to the trip down.  Luckily there were to jams on the way back.

The traffic jams also made a problem with the fart-relieving system.  Since we weren’t moving, or not moving that much, not much air came in from the open windows, and boy, it smelled bad!  Even I, who thinks that my farts smell like chicken, thought it smelled bad.  I ended up turning up the fan so air could be blown in through the little thingies in the car (what are they called?  Vents?)

Well, mom usually wakes up before my brother.  And when he wakes up, mom always asks (Chinese), “Do you need to pee?”

This was my brother’s first nap, and the only time the following happened.

He had wet himself.

Mom wasn’t very happy, and gave him new pants.  His wet pants weren’t washed for another 26 hours.

We ran into this sort of problem again in the middle of the next traffic jam - a car pulled over into the right shoulder and a guy ran out, into the bushes about 10 feet from the side of the road.

Dad said he probably had to pee so badly he just had to go.  And I agreed.  Everyone laughed.

Hey, you don’t find many rest areas when you’re traveling at 0 mph and then inching forward, then stopping, then inching forward…

Speaking of the word stopping, did you know to pass the time on the way down (besides reading), I listened to a program called Spelling Advantage?  Of course you didn’t…  Well, I learned a “useful” rule from it, and you really should memorize it.

If, in a word, the stress falls on the last syllable, or there is only one syllable, and the last letter of the word is a consonant proceeded by a single vowel, when adding a suffix that begins with a vowel, you need to double that last consonant.

Well, the day’s end was nearing, and dad suggested we stop for the night.  Dad really wanted Days Inn, but the price was too expensive.  $51.50. And on the way back the cost for the inn we stopped at (Traveler’s Inn) was $60.  Weirdo.

So we went to Comfort Inn next door, at $45 a night.  This was where mom should have washed my brother’s pants but didn’t.

The room smelled bad next morning.  There was more than one factor, as you can guess…

Comfort Inn offered free breakfast, and after that we got back on the road.  Comfort Inn was in St. George, in South Carolina, just off I-95.

The way down was pretty much the same - farts and jams.

We finally reached Embassy Suites in Orlando.  Before I got out of the car, I slapped the seat I was sitting in.  It smelled bad again.  In fact, the seat had picked up the scent of my fart!  Oh well.

We didn’t go anywhere on the first day, but Embassy Suites had a pool and an exercise room.  So, I decided to exercise, since I had sat in a car for two days.

I ran into this black adult.  He was lifting weights.  After I had run a mile on this really fancy treadmill, mom and dad came down with my brother, who was ready to swim.

After the black guy figured out mom and dad were my mom and dad, he asked, “So does your son play basketball?  Football?”

And mom “nicely” answered, “He’s not good at sports.  Just exercising.”

How nice.  But the black guy said, “That’s good!”

Well, dad wanted me to go and swim with my little brother.  But I was too sweaty from running, and had to take a shower.  There were showers near the exercise room, but…

“DAD!!!!  The water’s not getting warmer!”

I had to brace myself and jump in.

COLD!!!!!!!!  AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

I jumped out.  Whew.

Guess the temperature of the pool.

Actually it was pretty warm…too warm…

Well, I convinced my brother to get in, since he was scared of the water, and we played a while.  Mom kept complaining that it was too late.  11 PM, in fact.

Well, we spent the next three days at theme parks, and I guess we had fun.  But Embassy Suites’ breakfast was the BEST!  There were all sorts of things!!  FREE!!  Including:

Bacon & Eggs
Pancakes
Hashbrowns
Oranges
Melons
Did I mention Bacon & Eggs?  RIGHT FROM THE OVEN!!  OR WHEREVER…
White bread
Whole wheat bread
Cream cheese
Butter
Jelly
Did I mention Bacon & Eggs?
Bagels
Orange juice
Cranberry juice
Apple juice
Did I mention FREE Bacon & Eggs?
Sprite
Coke
Diet Coke
Pibb
Coffee
Jalapeños
FREE Bacon & Eggs!!!!!

—————————————————————————————————

Before we left to go back to Ohio, we decided to celebrate my brother’s birthday at Daytona Beach, located at the easternmost part of I-4.

John and I figured out that people born close to the beginning of the year are smarter.  Try it.  This should work 0% to 100% of the time!

Well, my brother’s birthday is Dec 27, which is closer to the beginning of the year than anyone else I know.  And he seems very smart.

Dad was born in May.  And at Daytona Beach, he drove the car into a sand pit.  Great.  We were stuck!

Mom obviously was not happy, and as my brother put it, “ma ma ma ba ba!”

But after many unsuccessful attempts to get out, a guy in a pickup truck came along and helped us out.

Dad said he had learned a lesson.  “Never drive where nobody has driven before.”  Whatever.

While we were eating my brother’s birthday cake, mom threw out a lot of crumbs onto the sand and a whole bunch of seagulls came for  the bread.  Dad wasn’t to happy, or as my brother would put it, “ba ba ma ma ma!”

On the way back, nothing happened.  Except for at the West Virginia Welcome Center…

I used the restroom there.  Everyone seemed to be looking at me, and it happened MORE than usual…

So, this girl looked down at my shoes first, then at me.  Then I looked down.

My shoes were on the wrong feet!!  Ohhhh…..

I muttered, “I meant to do that…”, then ran to the car and switched.  And stayed in the car.

Well, that’s about it, all that was eventful during the car trip.  Wheeeeee.

Okay, I’m done.  This took three days to type, so I actually got home on Thursday.  Ok, I’m really done.