Bettering yourself, part 12: is bettering yourself manipulative?

It seems manipulative to consciously act to improve people’s perception of you. Well, that’s the simple version: in everything we do I think there is partly a narcissistic motivation, but the fact of its existence does not nullify the benevolence of the action the (partly narcissistic) motivation effects. Nothing is entirely something, you know? And the majority of the situations in which you can use the behaviours and actions outlined are going to happen naturally anyway, so why not use them to your advantage and the advantage of others? Those advantages aren’t always mutually exclusive.

Here’s something I learned only last year: if you are living life properly, something will make you uncomfortable every day. This is my way of saying “Life begins outside your comfort zone”—because I don’t believe that at all. I spent 99% of my time in my comfort zone. It has a duvet, pyjamas, and an enormous TV. Trust me: it’s life. It might even be life at its best! But in the interest of committing to bettering yourself every day, you will have an application to send, a conversation to have, a phone call to make, an awkward thing to request, a need to make yourself vulnerable.

This, I reckon, is what people mean when they say “Do something every day that scares you.” I think an addendum to that is, “then feel stupid that you put it off so long for being scared of it, because it wasn’t that bad, was it?”

Day to day reality, more often than not, pales in comparison to the horrors of our imaginations. I think unfortunately that means that the joys of reality, more often than not, pale in comparison to how we imagine they will feel. But I won’t let that be an excuse for your stasis: you’re still here, and what’s important is that life is (again, more often than not) better when you do the thing than when you don’t. So you have to do the thing.

So again, if any of this sounds manipulative, well, the opposite, or nothing, sounds just as manipulative, if you think about it. By living in the world we are attempting, to various degrees, to manipulate things to our own ends—either for our personal benefit or to exact changes we have evaluated that the world needs. And what could be better than our own evaluation of the world? Even although we’re so underconfident and self-conscious ahaha. Being a human is weird.

Well, no matter how good your evaluation of reality, your evaluation is the only one you have, so you have to use it for hat reason. So if you agree that to live is to manipulate to various degrees, I would say the tips in the previous posts are some of the most utilitarian methods of manipulation available to us.

Try them out and let me know how it goes, because the world is starved of the above. Imagine, for example, how many steps you would have to go through to complete my request? Would have to read most of this mega-post (not everyone), maybe like it so I know you read it (not everyone), follow the advice (almost no one), observe its effects (hello?), report those back to me (anyone?)

It’s the 10% success rate, 90% no response thing, if that. Well actually, looking at Duotrope, my short story submission acceptance rate is just over 7%, and there’s a little message that congratulates me for being above average! But in life in general, just because there is no formal rejection, doesn’t mean the rejection isn’t there. Rejection in writing is just a more explicit demonstration of something that is happening in the world all around us all the time. But that doesn’t mean “Don’t do anything.” In fact, story rejections have trained my perception of the world at large, and even if we don’t get what we set out to achieve, there are almost always hidden goals we hadn’t anticipated that may well bring us closer to things we didn’t even know we wanted, or that were even available to us. And that’s much cooler!

People drop out of the race way easier than you’d think, in almost any arena in life. It’s way easier to rise to the top than it looks. There is a lot of competition, but is there a lot of serious competition? Not really.

In all aspects of life, it pays for us and for others to get noticed and be persistent.

Consider this my fulfilment of tip #8 :)