CHAPTER 3 
 
You Are Not Special 
 
I once knew a guy; we’ll call him Jimmy. 
Jimmy always had various business ventures going. On any 
given day, if you asked him what he was doing, he’d rattle off the 
name of some firm he was consulting with, or he’d describe a 
promising medical app he was looking for angel investors to 
fund, or he’d talk about some charity event he was supposed to 
be the keynote speaker for, or how he had an idea for a more effi- 
cient type of gas pump that was going to make him billions. The 
guy was always rolling, always on, and if you gave him an inch of 
conversational daylight, he’d pulverize you about how world- 
spinning his work was, how brilliant his latest ideas were, and 
he’d name-drop so much it felt like you were talking to a tabloid 
reporter. 
Jimmy was all positivity all the time. Always pushing himself, 

always working an angle—a real go-getter, whatever the fuck that 
means. 
The catch was that Jimmy was also a total deadbeat—all talk 
and no walk. Stoned a majority of the time, and spending as 
much money in bars and fine restaurants as he did on his “busi- 
ness ideas,” Jimmy was a professional leech, living off his fami- 
ly’s hard-won money by spinning them as well as everybody else 
in the city on false ideas of future tech glory. Sure, sometimes 
he’d put in some token effort, or pick up the phone and cold-call 
some bigwig and name-drop until he ran out of names, but noth- 
ing ever actually happened. None of these “ventures” ever blos- 
somed into anything. 
Yet the guy kept this up for years, living off girlfriends and 
more and more distant relatives well into his late twenties. And 
the most screwed-up part was that Jimmy felt good about it. He 
had a delusional level of self-confidence. People who laughed at 
him or hung up on him were, in his mind, “missing the oppor- 
tunity of their lives.” People who called him out on his bogus 

business ideas were “too ignorant and inexperienced” to under- 
stand his genius. People who pointed out his deadbeat lifestyle 
were “jealous”; they were “haters” who envied his success. 
Jimmy did make some money, although it was usually 
through the sketchiest of means, like selling another person’s 
business idea as his own, or finagling a loan from someone, or 
worse, talking someone into giving him equity in their start-up. 
He actually occasionally talked people into paying him to do 
some public speaking. (About what, I can’t even imagine.) 
The worst part was that Jimmy believed his own bullshit. His 
delusion was so bulletproof, it was honestly hard to get mad at 
him, it was actually kind of amazing. 
Sometime in the 1960s, developing “high self-esteem”— 
hav-ing positive thoughts and feelings about oneself—became 
all the rage in psychology. Research found that people who 
thought highly about themselves generally performed better and 
caused fewer problems. Many researchers and policymakers at 
the time came to believe that raising a population’s self-esteem 

could lead to some tangible social benefits: lower crime, better 
academic records, greater employment, lower budget deficits. As 
a result, beginning in the next decade, the 1970s, self-esteem 
practices began to be taught to parents, emphasized by thera- 
pists, politicians, and teachers, and instituted into educational 
policy. Grade inflation, for example, was implemented to make 
low-achieving kids feel better about their lack of achievement. 
Participation awards and bogus trophies were invented for any 
number of mundane and expected activities. Kids were given 
inane homework assignments, like writing down all the reasons 
why they thought they were special, or the five things they liked 
most about themselves. Pastors and ministers told their congre- 
gations that they were each uniquely special in God’s eyes, and 
were destined to excel and not be average. Business and motiva- 
tional seminars cropped up chanting the same paradoxical 
mantra: every single one of us can be exceptional and massively 
successful. 
But it’s a generation later and the data is in: we’re not all 

exceptional. It turns out that merely feeling good about yourself 
doesn’t really mean anything unless you have a good reason to 
feel good about yourself. It turns out that adversity and failure 
are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong- 
minded and successful adults. It turns out that teaching people 
to believe they’re exceptional and to feel good about themselves 
no matter what doesn’t lead to a population full of Bill Gateses 
and Martin Luther Kings. It leads to a population full of Jimmys. 
Jimmy, the delusional start-up founder. Jimmy, who smoked 
pot every day and had no real marketable skills other than talking 
himself up and believing it. Jimmy, the type of guy who yelled at 
his business partner for being “immature,” and then maxed out 
the company credit card at Le Bernardin trying to impress some 
Russian model. Jimmy, who was quickly running out of aunts 
and uncles who could loan him more money. 
Yes, that confident, high-self-esteem Jimmy. The Jimmy who 
spent so much time talking about how good he was that he for- 
got to, you know, actually do something. 

The problem with the self-esteem movement is that it mea- 
sured self-esteem by how positively people felt about them- 
selves. But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth 
is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves. If a 
person like Jimmy feels absolutely fucking great 99.9 percent of 
the time, despite his life falling apart around him, then how can 
that be a valid metric for a successful and happy life? 
Jimmy is entitled. That is, he feels as though he deserves 
good things without actually earning them. He believes he 
should be able to be rich without actually working for it. He be- 
lieves he should be liked and well-connected without actually 
helping anyone. He believes he should have an amazing lifestyle 
without actually sacrificing anything. 
People like Jimmy become so fixated on feeling good about 
themselves that they manage to delude themselves into believing 
that they are accomplishing great things even when they’re not. 
They believe they’re the brilliant presenter on stage when actually 
they’re making a fool of themselves. They believe they’re the 

successful start-up founder when, in fact, they’ve never had a 
successful venture. They call themselves life coaches and charge 
money to help others, even though they’re only twenty-five years 
old and haven’t actually accomplished anything substantial in 
their lives. 
Entitled people exude a delusional degree of self-confidence. 
This confidence can be alluring to others, at least for a little 
while. In some instances, the entitled person’s delusional level of 
confidence can become contagious and help the people around 
the entitled person feel more confident in themselves too. De- 
spite all of Jimmy’s shenanigans, I have to admit that it was fun 
hanging out with him sometimes. You felt indestructible around 
him. 
But the problem with entitlement is that it makes people need 
to feel good about themselves all the time, even at the expense of 
those around them. And because entitled people always need to 
feel good about themselves, they end up spending most of their 
time thinking about themselves. After all, it takes a lot of energy 

and work to convince yourself that your shit doesn’t stink, espe- 
cially when you’ve actually been living in a toilet. 
Once people have developed the thought pattern to con- 
stantly construe what happens around them as self-aggrandizing, 
it’s extremely hard to break them out of it. Any attempt to reason 
with them is seen as simply another “threat” to their superiority 
by another person who “can’t handle” how smart/talented/good- 
look-ing/cessfulful they are. 
Entitlement closes in upon itself in a kind of narcissistic bub- 
ble, distorting anything and everything in such a way as to rein- 
force itself. People who feel entitled view every occurrence in 
their life as either an affirmation of, or a threat to, their own 
greatness. If something good happens to them, it’s because of 
some amazing feat they accomplished. If something bad hap- 
pens to them, it’s because somebody is jealous and trying to 
bring them down a notch. Entitlement is impervious. People who 
are entitled delude themselves into whatever feeds their sense of 
superiority. They keep their mental facade standing at all costs, 

even if it sometimes requires being physically or emotionally 
abusive to those around them. 
But entitlement is a failed strategy. It’s just another high. It’s 
not happiness. 
The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels 
about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her 
negative experiences. A person like Jimmy hides from his prob- 
lems by making up imagined successes for himself at every turn. 
And because he can’t face his problems, no matter how good he 
feels about himself, he is weak. 
A person who actually has a high self-worth is able to look at 
the negative parts of his character frankly—“Yes, sometimes I’m 
irresponsible with money,” “Yes, sometimes I exaggerate my 
own successes,” “Yes, I rely too much on others to support me 
and should be more self-reliant”—and then acts to improve 
upon them. But entitled people, because they are incapable of ac- 
knowledging their own problems openly and honestly, are inca- 
pable of improving their lives in any lasting or meaningful way. 

They are left chasing high after high and accumulate greater and 
greater levels of denial. 
But eventually reality must hit, and the underlying problems 
will once again make themselves clear. It’s just a question of 
when, and how painful it will be. 

Things Fall Apart 
I sat in my 9:00 A.M. biology class, arms cradling my head on my 
desk as I stared at the clock’s second hand making laps, each 
tick syncopated with the teacher’s dronings-on about chromo- 
somes and mitosis. Like most thirteen-year-olds stuck in a stuffy, 
fluorescent classroom, I was bored. 
A knock came on the door. Mr. Price, the school’s assistant 
principal, stuck his head in. “Excuse me for interrupting. Mark, 
can you step outside with me for a moment? Oh, and bring your 
things with you.” 
Strange, I thought. Kids get sent to the principal, but the prin- 
cipal rarely gets sent to them. I gathered my things and stepped 
out. 
The hallway was empty. Hundreds of beige lockers converged 
on the horizon. “Mark, can you take me to your locker, please?” 
“Sure,” I say, and slug myself down the hall, baggy jeans and 
moppy hair and oversized Pantera T-shirt and all. 
We get to my locker. “Open it, please,” Mr. Price says; so I 

do. He steps in front of me and gathers my coat, my gym bag, 
my backpack—all of the locker’s contents, minus a few note- 
books and pencils. He starts walking away. “Come with me, 
please,” he says, without looking back. I start to get an uneasy 
feeling. 
I follow him to his office, where he asks me to sit down. He 
closes the door and locks it. He goes over to the window and ad- 
justs the blinds to block the view from outside. My palms begin 
to sweat. This is not a normal principal visit. 
Mr. Price sits down and quietly rummages through my things, 
checking pockets, unzipping zippers, shaking out my gym 
clothes and placing them on the floor. 
Without looking up at me, Mr. Price asks, “Do you know what 
I’m looking for, Mark?” 
“No,” I say. 
“Drugs.” 
The word shocks me into nervous attention. 
“D-d-drugs?” I stammer. “What kind?” 

He looks at me sternly. “I don’t know; what kind do you 
have?” He opens one of my binders and checks the small pock- 
ets meant for pens. 
My sweat blossoms like a fungal growth. It spreads from my 
palms to my arms and now my neck. My temples pulsate as 
blood floods my brain and face. Like most thirteen-year-olds 
freshly accused of possessing narcotics and bringing them to 
school, I want to run away and hide. 
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I protest, the words 
sounding far meeker than I’d like. I feel as if I should be sound- 
ing confident in myself right now. Or maybe not. Maybe I should 
be scared. Do liars sound more scared or confident? Because 
however they sound, I want to sound the opposite. Instead, my 
lack of confidence compounds, unconfidence about my sound- 
ing unconfident making me more unconfident. That fucking 
Feedback Loop from Hell. 
“We’ll see about that,” he says, turning his attention to my 
backpack, which seemingly has one hundred pockets. Each is 

loaded with its own silly teen desiderata—colored pens, old 
notes passed in class, early-nineties CDs with cracked cases, 
dried-up markers, an old sketchpad with half its pages missing, 
dust and lint and crap accumulated during a maddeningly cir- 
cuitous middle school existence. 
My sweat must be pumping at the speed of light, because 
time extends itself and dilates such that what is mere seconds on 
that 9:00 A.M. second-period biology clock now feels like Pale- 
olithic eons, and I’m growing up and dying every minute. Just me 
and Mr. Price and my bottomless backpack. 
Somewhere around the Mesolithic Age, Mr. Price finishes 
searching the backpack. Having found nothing, he seems flus- 
tered. He turns the pack upside down and lets all of my crap 
crash onto his office floor. He’s now sweating as profusely as I 
am, except in place of my terror, there is his anger. 
“No drugs today, eh?” He tries to sound casual. 
“Nope.” So do I. 
He spreads my stuff out, separating each item and 

coagulating them into little piles beside my gym gear. My coat 
and backpack now lie empty and lifeless on his lap. He sighs and 
stares at the wall. Like most thirteen-year-olds locked in an office 
with a man angrily throwing their shit all over the floor, I want to 
cry. 
Mr. Price scans the contents organized on the floor. Nothing 
illicit or illegal, no narcotics, not even anything against school 
policy. He sighs and then throws the coat and backpack on the 
floor too. He bends over and puts his elbows on his knees, mak- 
ing his face level with mine. 
“Mark, I’m going to give you one last chance to be honest 
with me. If you are honest, this will turn out much better for you. 
If it turns out you’re lying, then it’s going to be much worse.” 
As if on cue, I gulp. 
“Now tell me the truth,” Mr. Price demands. “Did you bring 
drugs to school today?” 
Fighting back tears, screams clawing at my throat, I stare my 
tormentor in the face and, in a pleading voice, dying to be 

relieved of its adolescent horrors, I say, “No, I don’t have any 
drugs. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 
“Okay,” he says, signaling surrender. “I guess you can collect 
your things and go.” 
He takes one last, longing gaze at my deflated backpack, lying 
like a broken promise there on his office floor. He casually puts 
one foot down on the pack, stomping lightly, a last-ditch effort. I 
anxiously wait for him to get up and leave so I can get on with 
my life and forget this whole nightmare. 
But his foot stops on something. “What is this?” he asks, tap- 
ping with his foot. 
“What is what?” I say. 
“There’s still something in here.” He picks up the bag and 
starts feeling around the bottom of it. For me the room gets 
fuzzy; everything goes wobbly. 
When I was young, I was smart. I was friendly. But I was also 
a shithead. I mean that in the most loving way possible. I was a 
rebellious, lying little shithead. Angry and full of resentment. 

When I was twelve, I hacked my house’s security system with re- 
frigerator magnets so I could sneak out undetected in the middle 
of the night. My friend and I would put his mom’s car in neutral 
and push it into the street so we could drive around without wak- 
ing her up. I would write papers about abortion because I knew 
my English teacher was a hardcore conservative Christian. An- 
other friend and I stole cigarettes from his mom and sold them 
to kids out behind the school. 
And I also cut a secret compartment into the bottom of my 
backpack to hide my marijuana. 
That was the same hidden compartment Mr. Price found after 
stepping on the drugs I was hiding. I had been lying. And, as 
promised, Mr. Price didn’t go easy on me. A few hours later, like 
most thirteen-year-olds handcuffed in the back of a police car, I 
thought my life was over. 
And I was kind of right, in a way. My parents quarantined me 
at home. I was to have no friends for the foreseeable future. Hav- 
ing been expelled from school, I was to be homeschooled for the 
rest of the year. My mom made me get a haircut and threw out all 

of my Marilyn Manson and Metallica shirts (which, for an 
adolescent in 1998, was tantamount to being sentenced to death 
by lameness). My dad dragged me to his office with him in the 
mornings and made me file papers for hours on end. Once 
homeschooling was over, I was enrolled in a small, private Chris- 
tian school, where—and this may not surprise you—I didn’t ex- 
actly fit in. 
And just when I had finally cleaned up my act and turned in 
my assignments and learned the value of good clerical respon- 
sibility, my parents decided to get divorced. 
I tell you all of this only to point out that my adolescence 
sucked donkey balls. I lost all of my friends, my community, my 
legal rights, and my family within the span of about nine months. 
My therapist in my twenties would later call this “some real trau- 
matic shit,” and I would spend the next decade-and-change 
working on unraveling it and becoming less of a self-absorbed, 
entitled little prick. 
The problem with my home life back then was not all of the 
horrible things that were said or done; rather, it was all of the 

horrible things that needed to be said and done but weren’t. My 
family stonewalls the way Warren Buffett makes money or Jenna 
Jameson fucks: we’re champions at it. The house could have 
been burning down around us and it would have been met with, 
“Oh no, everything’s fine. A tad warm in here, perhaps—but re- 
ally, everything’s fine.” 
When my parents got divorced, there were no broken dishes, 
no slammed doors, no screaming arguments about who fucked 
whom. Once they had reassured my brother and me that it 
wasn’t our fault, we had a Q&A session—yes, you read that 
right—about the logistics of the new living arrangements. Not a 
tear was shed. Not a voice was raised. The closest peek my 
brother and I got into our parents’ unraveling emotional lives 
was hearing, “Nobody cheated on anybody.” Oh, that’s nice. It 
was a tad warm in the room, but really, everything was fine. 
My parents are good people. I don’t blame them for any of 
this (not anymore, at least). And I love them very much. They 
have their own stories and their own journeys and their own 

problems, just as all parents do. And just as all of their parents 
do, and so on. And like all parents, my parents, with the best of 
intentions, imparted some of their problems to me, as I probably 
will to my kids. 
When “real traumatic shit” like this happens in our lives, we 
begin to unconsciously feel as though we have problems that 
we’re incapable of ever solving. And this assumed inability to 
solve our problems causes us to feel miserable and helpless. 
But it also causes something else to happen. If we have prob- 
lems that are unsolvable, our unconscious figures that we’re ei- 
ther uniquely special or uniquely defective in some way. That 
we’re somehow unlike everyone else and that the rules must be 
different for us. 
Put simply: we become entitled. 
The pain from my adolescence led me down a road of enti- 
tlement that lasted through much of my early adulthood. Where- 
as Jimmy’s entitlement played out in the business world, where 
he pretended to be a huge success, my entitlement played out in 

my relationships, particularly with women. My trauma had re- 
volved around intimacy and acceptance, so I felt a constant need 
to overcompensate, to prove to myself that I was loved and ac- 
cepted at all times. And as a result, I soon took to chasing 
women the same way a cocaine addict takes to a snowman made 
out of cocaine: I made sweet love to it, and then promptly suffo- 
cated myself in it. 
I became a player—an immature, selfish, albeit sometimes 
charming player. And I strung up a long series of superficial and 
unhealthy relationships for the better part of a decade. 
It wasn’t so much the sex I craved, although the sex was fun. 
It was the validation. I was wanted; I was loved; for the first time 
since I could remember, I was worthy. My craving for validation 
quickly fed into a mental habit of self-aggrandizing and 
overindulgence. I felt entitled to say or do whatever I wanted, to 
break people’s trust, to ignore people’s feelings, and then justify 
it later with shitty, half-assed apologies. 
While this period certainly had its moments of fun and 

excitement, and I met some wonderful women, my life was more 
or less a wreck the whole time. I was often unemployed, living on 
friends’ couches or with my mom, drinking way more than I 
should have been, alienating a number of friends—and when I 
did meet a woman I really liked, my self-absorption quickly torpe- 
doed everything. 
The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our 
problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to compensate for 
those problems. This entitlement plays out in one of two ways: 
 
1.   I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve spe- 
cial treatment. 
2.   I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve 
special treatment. 
 
Opposite mindset on the outside, but the same selfish 
creamy core in the middle. In fact, you will often see entitled peo- 
ple flip back and forth between the two. Either they’re on top of 

the world or the world is on top of them, depending on the day 
of the week, or how well they’re doing with their particular addic- 
tion at that moment. 
Most people correctly identify a person like Jimmy as a raging 
narcissistic ass-hat. That’s because he’s pretty blatant in his 
delusionally high self-regard. What most people don’t correctly 
identify as entitlement are those people who perpetually feel as 
though they’re inferior and unworthy of the world. 
Because construing everything in life so as to make yourself 
out to be constantly victimized requires just as much selfishness 
as the opposite. It takes just as much energy and delusional self- 
aggrandizement to maintain the belief that one has insur- 
mountable problems as that one has no problems at all. 
The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem. 
If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people 
have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in 
the future. Likely people you know too. That doesn’t minimize 
the problem or mean that it shouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean you 

aren’t legitimately a victim in some circumstances. 
It just means that you’re not special. 
Often, it’s this realization—that you and your problems are 
actually not privileged in their severity or pain—that is the first 
and most important step toward solving them. 
But for some reason, it appears that more and more people, 
particularly young people, are forgetting this. Numerous profes- 
sors and educators have noted a lack of emotional resilience and 
an excess of selfish demands in today’s young people. It’s not 
uncommon now for books to be removed from a class’s cur- 
riculum for no other reason than that they made someone feel 
bad. Speakers and professors are shouted down and banned 
from campuses for infractions as simple as suggesting that 
maybe some Halloween costumes really aren’t that offensive. 
School counselors note that more students than ever are exhibit- 
ing severe signs of emotional distress over what are otherwise 
run-of-the-mill daily college experiences, such as an argument 
with a roommate, or getting a low grade in a class. 

It’s strange that in an age when we are more connected than 
ever, entitlement seems to be at an all-time high. Something 
about recent technology seems to allow our insecurities to run 
amok like never before. The more freedom we’re given to express 
ourselves, the more we want to be free of having to deal with 
anyone who may disagree with us or upset us. The more exposed 
we are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to get upset 
that those other viewpoints exist. The easier and more problem- 
free our lives become, the more we seem to feel entitled for them 
to get even better. 
The benefits of the Internet and social media are unques- 
tionably fantastic. In many ways, this is the best time in history 
to be alive. But perhaps these technologies are having some 
unintended social side effects. Perhaps these same technologies 
that have liberated and educated so many are simultaneously en- 
abling people’s sense of entitlement more than ever before. 

The Tyranny of Exceptionalism 
Most of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if 
you’re exceptional at one thing, chances are you’re average or 
below average at most other things. That’s just the nature of life. 
To become truly great at something, you have to dedicate shit- 
tons of time and energy to it. And because we all have limited 
time and energy, few of us ever become truly exceptional at more 
than one thing, if anything at all. 
We can then say that it’s a statistical improbability that any 
single person will be an extraordinary performer in all areas of 
life, or even in many areas of their life. Brilliant businesspeople 
are often fuckups in their personal lives. Extraordinary athletes 
are often shallow and as dumb as a lobotomized rock. Many 
celebrities are probably just as clueless about life as the people 
who gawk at them and follow their every move. 
We’re all, for the most part, pretty average people. But it’s the 
extremes that get all of the publicity. We kind of know this al- 
ready, but we rarely think and/or talk about it, and we certainly 

never discuss why this could be a problem. 
Having the Internet, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and access 
to five hundred–plus channels of television is amazing. But our 
attention is limited. There’s no way we can process the tidal 
waves of information flowing past us constantly. Therefore, the 
only zeroes and ones that break through and catch our attention 
are the truly exceptional pieces of information—those in the 
99.999th percentile. 
All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. 
The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest phys- 
ical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. The 
scariest threats. Nonstop. 
Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes 
of the bell curve of human experience, because in the media 
business that’s what gets eyeballs, and eyeballs bring dollars. 
That’s the bottom line. Yet the vast majority of life resides in the 
humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, in- 
deed quite average. 

This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to be- 
lieve that exceptionalism is the new normal. And because we’re 
all quite average most of the time, the deluge of exceptional 
information drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate, 
because clearly we are somehow not good enough. So more and 
more we feel the need to compensate through entitlement and 
addiction. We cope the only way we know how: either through 
self-aggrandizing or through other-aggrandizing. 
Some of us do this by cooking up get-rich-quick schemes. 
Others do it by taking off across the world to save starving ba- 
bies in Africa. Others do it by excelling in school and winning 
every award. Others do it by shooting up a school. Others do it 
by trying to have sex with anything that talks and breathes. 
This ties in to the growing culture of entitlement that I talked 
about earlier. Millennials often get blamed for this cultural shift, 
but that’s likely because millennials are the most plugged-in and 
visible generation. In fact, the tendency toward entitlement is 
apparent across all of society. And I believe it’s linked to 

mass-media-driven exceptionalism. 
The problem is that the pervasiveness of technology and 
mass marketing is screwing up a lot of people’s expectations for 
themselves. The inundation of the exceptional makes people feel 
worse about themselves, makes them feel that they need to be 
more extreme, more radical, and more self-assured to get no- 
ticed or even matter. 
When I was a young man, my insecurities around intimacy 
were exacerbated by all the ridiculous narratives of masculinity 
circulating throughout pop culture. And those same narratives 
are still circulating: to be a cool guy, you have to party like a rock 
star; to be respected, you have to be admired by women; sex is 
the most valuable thing a man can attain, and it’s worth sacri- 
ficing anything (including your own dignity) to get it. 
This constant stream of unrealistic media dogpiles onto our 
existing feelings of insecurity, by overexposing us to the unreal- 
istic standards we fail to live up to. Not only do we feel subjected 
to unsolvable problems, but we feel like losers because a simple 

Google search shows us thousands of people without those 
same problems. 
Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us 
new psychological problems. The Internet has not just open- 
sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self- 
doubt, and shame. 

B-b-b-but, If I’m Not Going to Be Special or Extraordinary, What’s 
the Point? 
It has become an accepted part of our culture today to believe 
that we are all destined to do something truly extraordinary. Cele- 
brities say it. Business tycoons say it. Politicians say it. Even 
Oprah says it (so it must be true). Each and every one of us can 
be extraordinary. We all deserve greatness. 
The fact that this statement is inherently contradictory—after 
all, if everyone were extraordinary, then by definition no one would 
be extraordinary—is missed by most people. And instead of 
questioning what we actually deserve or don’t deserve, we eat the 
message up and ask for more. 
Being “average” has become the new standard of failure. The 
worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of 
the bell curve. When a culture’s standard of success is to “be ex- 
traordinary,” it then becomes better to be at the extreme low end 
of the bell curve than to be in the middle, because at least there 
you’re still special and deserve attention. Many people choose 

this strategy: to prove to everyone that they are the most miser- 
able, or the most oppressed, or the most victimized. 
A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they 
believe that if they accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never 
improve, and that their life won’t matter. 
This sort of thinking is dangerous. Once you accept the 
premise that a life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and 
great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human 
population (including yourself) sucks and is worthless. And this 
mindset can quickly turn dangerous, to both yourself and others. 
The rare people who do become truly exceptional at some- 
thing do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the 
contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with 
improvement. And that obsession with improvement stems from 
an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. It’s 
anti-entitlement. People who become great at something become 
great because they understand that they’re not already great— 
they are mediocre, they are average—and that they could be so 

much better. 
All of this “every person can be extraordinary and achieve 
greatness” stuff is basically just jerking off your ego. It’s a mes- 
sage that tastes good going down, but in reality is nothing more 
than empty calories that make you emotionally fat and bloated, 
the proverbial Big Mac for your heart and your brain. 
The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, 
comes from eating your veggies—that is, accepting the bland 
and mundane truths of life: truths such as “Your actions actually 
don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The 
vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and 
that’s okay.” This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very 
bad. You will avoid accepting it. 
But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more po- 
tent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to be some- 
thing amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your 
back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and 
constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the 

knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will 
actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accom- 
plish, without judgment or lofty expectations. 
You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experi- 
ences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, 
helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with 
someone you care about. 
Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are 
ordinary. But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they 
are what actually matters. 

More Chapters coming soon