A: Let me help you: as special, perfect, and good-looking as you are, you still comprise only about 1/6 billionth of humanity. That’s right, you make up .00000000167th of the human experience. That’s nine decimal places just to get back up to one, Sport.

Nine.

Are we over ourselves yet?

Don’t worry, it took me some time to even recognize that I had this problem, let alone do something about it. Anyone who knew me in college can attest to the fact that I spent a good chunk of time being full of myself. If I didn’t like my clean up assignment in the house, I skipped it; that kind of thing. What a joy I must’ve been to be around.

I think BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, et. al. would do humanity a huge favor if, after making people tap the warning screen on their GPS systems, a voice would come on and simply say, “Nice car. Whoop-dee-doo. Get over yourself.”

Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Still, you should do it. Get over yourself, that is.

Why? Look at it this way: if you’re ego is that precious, imagine what you’ll get for it if you trade it in. I’m not sure what’s going to get you over you, but I can tell you what gets me over me… what helps propel me past the major hurdle that is my ego. An incomplete, still-growing list:

1. My wife telling me that I held a lot of grudges. Realizing that I was carrying so many torches forced me to confront the probability that I was the one causing the problems. The alternative was that I had somehow, cosmically, attracted over half a dozen people into my existence who were congenitally incapable of having normal relationships… a theory blown out of the water by the fact that they had lots of normal relationships, just not with me. (What about me? Yes, I had friends. I wasn’t an a-hole to everybody. Sheesh.)
2. Learning to sell something. My goodness, if you’ve never rolled up your sleeves and tried your hand at sales, I suggest you do so at your earliest possible opportunity. Suddenly, my academic pedigree meant nothing. It didn’t matter how smart I was, how funny I was, how good looking I was, or how good my stories were. All that mattered was whether or not I could solve someone else’s problem. Someone else… can you imagine?! And this wasn’t like a charity where I could fool myself into thinking that I was helping the less fortunate; if I didn’t sell, then I was the less fortunate one!
3. Learning to read people. When I started doing assessments, the first exercise I did was to fill up legal sheet-length columns on various individuals’ positive and negative attributes. This forced me to see others in a balanced light… which had the interesting effect of causing me to see me in a balanced light. (Suddenly, they weren’t so simple anymore. And I wasn’t so good looking anymore!)
4. Having kids. The best demotion I’ve ever taken.
5. Coming to understand what I’m truly good at. There are a few things that I do that make me an excellent management consultant. Once I realized this, I no longer needed to go out and try to one-up others at every turn. I could let them be great at their thing, and they’d let me be great at mine.
6. 6.Wanting to be done with a high school mentality. Drama, while exciting on some level, is also exhausting. I think I just got bored with it. This required me to not care about a lot of things.
7. 7.Skiing. No matter how great a skier I were to become, I’d never be greater than the mountain. Not even close. I’ve gotten some great perspective from my time on the mountain.
8. 8.Living. I own my own business, and I’ve had a lot of very good luck getting it to where it is today. But I haven’t been perfect, and not every day, week, or even month has been a cakewalk. It doesn’t more that a sleepless night or two, wondering which is going to hit first, the check I deposited or the check I wrote, to realize how fragile success can be.
9. 9.Writing. It’s hard to write about the need to take 100% personal responsibility for your own success and not have a little bit of the concept sink in… and in my case, what sank in was, “If I’m having a problem with someone, it’s on me to get us out of it. Regardless of who started it, I am responsible for ending it.” You can’t end an argument with a holier-than-thou, back-handed compliment. You end it only by helping everyone save face.

Am I perfectly modest? Please. I’m not perfectly anything. When I achieve perfection in anything, they’ll stick me up on a mountain top to dispense answers to weary wisdom-seekers. But, I am trying to make the most of the .00000000167th slice of humanity I represent. And I am finding the efforts surprisingly rewarding.

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