Ultimately, if others don’t value you, you are in trouble. If you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to trade.
Self-esteem comes from knowing yourself competent to live, but that competence comes from feedback, from the result of creating value and attempting to trade it.
Thoughts?
Self-esteem comes from yourself. That self value drives you to accomplish, to produce and to live which in turn causes others to value you. Ever notice that people who do not value themselves are often overlooked as being of value to anyone else regardless of talents and value?
But you don’t value yourself in a vaccum. You’re only something if you are something in a world.
But you are not necessarily only something if you are something to someone else. Stranded on a desert Isle I would not value myself less because there was no one there to see what I had done.
If you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to trade.
I think that this is the problem. You don’t -have to- trade value for value, sometimes it just feels good to create something that matters to you. I understand the “feedback” you mentioned, but there is also personal, self-caused feedback. You are always something in the world if you put yourself first. “The people around me don’t care about me, but I care about me because I live my life as best I can.” Yes, it is important to also be valued back, but you can’t even feel valued by another person without valuing yourself in the first place. If people around you don’t even value anything about you, that doesn’t always mean you have nothing of value to yourself.
I’m not talking about being valued as being liked, but as competence to produce something others would offer value (money) for. All your self-esteem would mean nothing in a desert island if you have no skills to survive.
Self-esteem comes from knowing yourself competent to live, but that competence comes from feedback, from the result of creating value and attempting to trade it.
My competence to do something, anything, is not caused by other people’s estimation of what I do. Whether I am competent to play the violin, or dig a square hole, is a fact and it isn’t defined by the attitude of others.
What you’ve done is substituted other people’s judgment for actual fact. The problem with your equation is that people do not automatically respond based on objective facts and using the same values that I have. For example, if you dig objectively excellent square holes but nobody wants to hire you to dig such holes, either because they are idiots and can’t see the craftsmanship of your holes, or because they don’t share with you that value. Feedback (which is a kind of noise, in case you’re curious) is useless. What you should seek is a rational critique of what you produce, checking first and foremost that your evaluators share essential values with you.
If you find that nobody shares your values e.g. your passion for square holes, then you should reconsider your career because it is not in fact a rational path to pursue in life. That speaks only to your competence to judge the market, not your competence at producing what you produce.
You do not necessarily have to produce anything that is of use to another person in order to gain self esteem from achieving your values. You can make yourself an amazing gourmet breakfast and enjoy eating it, this always helps my self esteem. Ultimately your pride must come from -your- recognition of value in -yourself- or something you have produced. Trading value for value is not necessary for man’s psychological health, but necessary for man’s moral existence in the modern age.
I add, if you lived in a cabin in the woods, completely self sustained, and never saw anyone else, you could still have a high self esteem, so long as you value that life, or something you gain from that life.
All your self-esteem would mean nothing in a desert island if you have no skills to survive.
If you have no skills to survive, then you have no reason to hold yourself in esteem. On the other hand, if you do have the skills, then you also have a reason for self-esteem, and you can survive, regardless of whether there are others valuing your skills.
Being able to produce the values you need is the primary source of your survival; trade is only a secondary consequence of the need to be productive.
No no, people, you don’t understand. We should provide others with esteem according to our ability to give praise and receive esteem according to our need for it.
That way everyone wins!
If you find that nobody shares your values e.g. your passion for square holes, then you should reconsider your career because it is not in fact a rational path to pursue in life. That speaks only to your competence to judge the market, not your competence at producing what you produce.
In what is this different from being a Keating?
If you have no skills to survive, then you have no reason to hold yourself in esteem. On the other hand, if you do have the skills, then you also have a reason for self-esteem, and you can survive, regardless of whether there are others valuing your skills.
This is what I was asking, thanks. So the skills come first?
In what is this different from being a Keating?
This is what I was asking, thanks. So the skills come first?
I think Dr. Peikoff’s 64th podcast will be beneficial to you.
One ought not to be so concerned with others from any perspective, but rather assess one’s one abilities within the context of what you can do and accomplish. If others don’t see it, then maybe you cannot earn a living from doing it, but that in and of itself does not mean that your abilities are worthless. As a personal example, I have written good many good poems and several good short stories, but given the responses to those on my website for about three years now, I may not be able to bring them all together into one book and earn a living from them. I still think they are good, but they are definitely not very popular. Also, I recognize that we live in an irrational society that does not recognize rational art; which leaves me out in the cold. Maybe eventually, I will find my audience, but I haven’t yet. So I produce what I produce from the selfish pleasure of such production.
Ultimately, if others don’t value you, you are in trouble. If you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to trade.
Self-esteem comes from knowing yourself competent to live, but that competence comes from feedback, from the result of creating value and attempting to trade it.
Thoughts?
Your ability to live in society doing what you like to do does depend on others to some extent, as well as on other factors. It still doesn’t make the standard for self esteem how others evaluate you. SELF-esteem is your evaluation of yourself. It is a mistake to let other dictate how you should judge yourself, or to try to substitute their judgment for your own.
In any profession if you wish to make money you need to provide something of value to other people. Still this does not mean that the industrialist who’s producing pipes, for example, should take the opinion of every layman as to how to market or produce pipes. He needs to make himself the expert, to judge his pipes by his knowledge and standard and then to offer that product to others.
I’m not big on history, but I think if you look at all the men who succeeded big time, you’ll see they always followed their own mind, what they thought was right. People like Walmart, Edison, Ford… Even when people told them it can’t be done, it’s foolish, etc’ they stood by their own vision and their own knowledge and judgment, pulled through and ended up with a great product they could make money from. The key to their success was independent thinking.
The same is true for other professions.
For an artist (such as yourself) this is especially important because the fuel to create art comes from (a form of) self-expression. If an artist tries to substitute self-expression with creating whatever others want him to, he’s finished right there. Not only will he/she lose motivation after a while, but also they would never, in my opinion, be able to create good art.
Thomas, aren’t the skills that you can actually trade the ones that hold real value, though? Isn’t what others value part of the reality you live in and doesn’t an individual’s identity depend on reality?
Ifat, attempting to live of one’s personal art is very hard, because thousands of people are offering their images for free nowadays. It’s like trying to sell a web browser. The pleasure of visual art is in seeing it and few people have a desire to own an image as a physical object after they saw it. The most marketable jobs in art are the less personal, such as concept art for film and games, for instance.
Thomas, aren’t the skills that you can actually trade the ones that hold real value, though? Isn’t what others value part of the reality you live in and doesn’t an individual’s identity depend on reality?
I don’t think one ought to judge the value of one’s art based upon if others will see it as valuable and want to pay you for it. You need to develop an independent assessment of the value of your art. That is, does it concretize what you seek to concretize in an objective manner; does it contain the facts necessary to convey what you think needs to be conveyed? Howard Roark had a very difficult struggle to become successful, but he was able to eventually make a living from his art. I work in the art business, and I have seen some wonderful art that was able to make a living for those artists, so it is not impossible.
I think you should also keep in mind that we live in a mostly irrational culture where the most god-awful art is the most popular. But it is possible to find a niche market. I haven’t been able to do that yet, but I also haven’t written books of poetry and short stories, so I don’t know if they would sell or not; and I have to keep that in mind or I get discouraged. So, I think what you ought to do is to make your art for it’s own sake in a sense; that is, make a portfolio and keep expanding it, and then one day put it all together into a book and sell it. There is no guarantee that others will see it as valuable, however. So, maybe you will have to keep “a day job” as you aim for success in the field you want to accomplish the most. And, no, it is not easy, but if doing good art makes your life worthwhile, then do it.
So the skills come first?
It’s more like a cycle. You successfully exercise your skills; the experience gives you self-esteem; the self-esteem allows you to develop further skills and continue exercising your existing ones.
Each of us learns some basic skills in the pre-conceptual stage of his life (such as sight, walking, and speech), so in this sense, the skills do come first–but of course anyone who stops there and doesn’t develop any other skills won’t have much self-esteem by the time he grows up.
Ultimately, if others don’t value you, you are in trouble. If you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to trade.
Self-esteem comes from knowing yourself competent to live, but that competence comes from feedback, from the result of creating value and attempting to trade it.
Thoughts?
If others don’t value you----- is exactly why you need to value yourself, to my mind.
In fact, I’d argue the converse; that you are in trouble if you pay too much attention to how much others value you.
I think that beyond the need to be productive [of course], to be effective [yes!], to be able to trade your skills in the market place [yes!], is a need to feel “right” in yourself.
Others and the market are fickle entities. You certainly can’t allow them to be the final arbiter on who you are, and how high a price you set on You.
Can you, Jill?
Ultimately, if others don’t value you, you are in trouble. If you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to trade.
Self-esteem comes from knowing yourself competent to live, but that competence comes from feedback, from the result of creating value and attempting to trade it.
Thoughts?
Just to explore this line of thought further:
You can’t control what other people think. You can give them reasons, even excellent strong reasons, to think well of you but people can be and are irrational all the time so the influence of reasons is limited.
If others don’t value you, you are in trouble.
We can’t control, and have limited influence over, other people’s values.
Therefore we can’t control, and have limited influence over whether we are in trouble or not.
I don’t like where this goes.
In the process of Mankind moving from the tribe towards the individual - which took forever to get going, and even now is faltering - a bunch of ‘hang overs’ have stayed with us.
Of themselves they are not wrong (as such) , in fact at one time they were life- affirming essentials to survive in a harsh (by Nature, and by man) unknowable world. Pragmatism was paramount, the good of the tribe was unquestionable.
Rand’s " Civilisation is the process of setting man free from men. Civilisation is the progress toward a society of privacy", clearly, and forever, identifies what should never need to exist again - the group.
So these ‘hang-overs’ have in common the archaic need to be a part of the collective, and its survival. They are - 'belongingness,'approval, admiration, acceptance, appreciation, status. - And servitude, duty, and sacrifice,( in order to claim and earn that approval from others in the tribe.)
IMO, Ayn Rand’s call to Individualism was a ‘unilateral declaration of Independence’, each person is faced with making. Not that she discounted the human need for approval from others, totally.
No, she just placed them further down the totem pole, where they belong, and replaced all those hang-overs with the true virtues of Productivity, trade, Pride, and Esteem.
I’m not talking about earning approval. If what a person really likes about life is not profitable, the person is in trouble. So the person has to change according to reality and reality also includes other people and what they value.