Epiphany: Was it so bad that I used to work toward perfection?

By David McElroy · December 25, 2018

If you’re certain about what you want and you’re relentless in doing things your way, you’re going to create some enemies.

Most people don’t appreciate certainty in others. They don’t appreciate strong convictions about what’s right and what’s wrong. They don’t appreciate people who step out from the crowd and say, “I’m going to do this my way.”

When I was a teen-ager and when I was a young adult, I had strong ideas about how to do things and I didn’t let anything get in the way of my pursuing what I saw as the right way. What’s more, I’m not sure I was socially aware enough at the time to notice or even care that people didn’t like my certainty and my drive to do things my way. For many years, I didn’t even understand that others would resent such a person. It would have baffled me.

I’ve had something of an epiphany in the last few days. I might have discovered something that will take me back toward something I used to be. I’m not sure yet, but it might be very important.

When I started working in the newspaper business, I didn’t have any desire for a career in journalism, but if I was going to work at a newspaper, I was going to do things the right way. I was going to devour all the information I could get from others. I was going to quiz them relentlessly about best practices and what they had learned. And then I was going to pursue what seemed to me to be “the right way to do things.”

I quickly learned how to do every job in my newsroom. I wrote sports. I covered city councils. I shot news, sports and feature photos. I developed film and printed photographs. I even spent one summer writing and editing weddings when I ran what had once been the “women’s desk.” At a small daily newspaper, there was opportunity to learn as much as you wanted if you kept asking questions and asking for more responsibility.

In the photo above, you see some of the tools of the trade from the time. We didn’t have computers to handle layout or photos. All we had were primitive word processors connected to typesetting machines. Every element of a page had to be meticulously built using sheets of type and headlines and border tape. I learned all the technical skills to do any job in the newsroom or the composing department. By the time I left that newspaper, I could do every job in the building except running the press.

I already knew grammar when I started, but I had to quickly learn Associated Press style and how to type. (I didn’t tell them I didn’t know how to type when they offered me my first part-time job.) I became a good writer and then I became an even better editor.

I was good enough at what I did that I became managing editor of this small daily by the time I was still just 21 years old. I was the youngest managing editor of a daily in the country at the time. (Our best writer was only one year older than I was, but everybody else was considerably older than we were.)

Some people resented me, but I barely noticed and it didn’t bother me. I was having too much fun and I was learning too quickly. All I knew is that I had a vision for what could be — and I was pursuing that as fast as I knew how.

There were plenty of things in my life during those years when I showed the same characteristics. If I was going to do something, I jumped into it with both feet — and I did things my way. I fought against authority figures who opposed me and I ignored their rules when I couldn’t get around them any other way. I tried to be good enough that they wouldn’t dare get rid of me — because they would see what I was doing and ultimately agree that I had been right. It was a high-risk strategy, but it was the only way I worked at the time.

Over the years, I went through a lot of maturing and self-improvement. I came to see that I had been too arrogant and too certain about a lot of things. I’ve talked about some of that before — but I find myself rethinking some of that now. Maybe in making this change, I also threw away the certainty and drive I had always had to do the right things and to do them correctly.

This is very difficult to summarize, because understanding it would require knowing a couple of turning points in my life and understanding the changes I went through at those points. I’ve ended up at a place at which I second-guess myself and don’t assert that my way is the right way. I had to find the humility to quit worrying about being right.

But what if I went too far in the opposite direction?

What if I became so worried about people seeing me as arrogant or egotistical that I stopped pushing to do things my way? What if that killed the very thing which made me such a success early in life?

I was listening to an audiobook a few days ago dealing with my Enneagram personality type. It mentioned that when a Type 4 (Individualist) — that’s me — is emotionally healthy and growing, the person can appear to be a healthy and high-functioning Type 1 (Reformer). I had heard that before, but I’d never spent much time thinking about it. So I took some time to study the Type 1 — and I was floored at what I realized.

If you look at the best aspects of a healthy Type 1, those sound eerily like what I had been when I had been a successful young man. I had been certain that I knew how to make things better — in anything I did — and I was certain I was right. I pursued change not from any egotistical need, but from a strong desire to do “the right thing.” It was always a matter of doing what ought to be done.

I’m oversimplifying things to explain them here, but listening to writer and teacher Helen Palmer talk about a healthy Type 1, I saw myself as I was back then. And I realized with horror that I’ve lost that part of myself — in a well-intentioned desire not to seem arrogant or judgmental.

I didn’t do things back then because someone else wanted me to. I did things only because they were interesting enough for me to care how they were done. That was true when I successfully plotted to take over the youth group at my church or when I radically changed my high school newspaper or when I entered a last-second speaking competition.

If I didn’t care about something, I didn’t get tangled up in it. If I did care about it, I pursued taking over and changing it from scratch.

(I tried to take over the student newspaper at the University of Alabama, but I failed. As an outsider, I shouldn’t have even been a candidate to be the editor, but I almost convinced the Media Planning Board to give me the job. But that’s another story. It hurt to fail at that, but it was typical of my approach. I didn’t spend several years working my way through the system “waiting my turn.” Instead, I aggressively sold the board on giving me the job. I wanted to run the place — and completely change it — or I wanted nothing to do with it.)

In my desire to avoid sounding arrogant or egotistical, I’m not pursuing things I know are right today. Even when I’m in a position where I know things are being done incorrectly — in ways that won’t achieve the stated objectives — I meekly go along, because the stakes aren’t high enough for me to fight for my way and because I don’t want to appear arrogant.

I don’t know for sure where this is going to lead, but I see three immediate points I need to learn from this.

First, I need to pursue only things I care about enough to fight for what’s right (by my standards). I don’t need to continue letting myself do things which someone else simply wants to pay to have done. I will never shine or achieve great things in such a situation.

Second, I need to find a way to allow myself to say, “I’m going to do this my way,” but without being arrogant or egotistical about it. I have to be able to tell other people that I might be wrong about some particular thing, but that if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it my way. This isn’t because I’m perfect. This is because trusting my judgment about what’s right has brought me success in the past. I need to trust that again — and stop compromising about it.

Third, I need to remember why I always worked best with a partner. When I did projects with partners early in my life, I was most successful when there was someone else who I trusted along for the ride. It had to be someone who trusted me, but when there was that mutual trust, I could do my best work — and that person could often be the buffer between my stubbornness and those on the outside who wouldn’t react well to my steamroller approach.

I feel as though I’m still stumbling forward in the dark, but I also feel as though some things are becoming more clear every day. I feel as though I’m understanding why I was so successful early in life — and why I lost some of that as I tried to care too much what other people thought of me.

I’ve known for years that I had to recover something from the past to become myself again. (Here’s something I wrote five years ago about it.) I knew I was missing something — and I might have found an essential piece of it in the last few days.

If I can find a way to pursue the things which I absolutely know are right — but without appearing arrogant and running over people — I might very well be able to pick up where I left off when I got off track years ago.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

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