What if repairing my worst flaw meant losing my greatest power?

By David McElroy · June 11, 2021

I miss being arrogant and overconfident.

That sounds odd. I understand that. But it’s hard for others to understand the “superpower” that I lost when I started fixing my worst flaw. It’s impossible for me to explain to you the difference between what I feel like today and what I felt like when that photo was taken.

Imagine feeling total confidence in yourself. Imagine being convinced you were pretty much always right. Imagine knowing you could do anything you wanted to do.

It was a rush of confidence. A feeling of power. A quiet belief in my superiority. And a faith that I would always win. That’s the way I felt back then. It added up to feelings of security and self-worth and certainty.

But then I confronted my dark side. I faced my worst flaws. I confessed what I had done to hurt others. And I changed myself. Not overnight. But I changed.

My belief in myself had led me to a lot of success when I was young. (Those successes were never enough, of course. I thought I deserved more.) I could walk into any situation — any room, with any people, in any situation — and believe I could find a way to win.

And for the most part, I did win.

I did things that a young guy wasn’t supposed to do. I made a lot of money. I won elections for some politicians. I impressed some people. I made others jealous. And I stepped on a lot of people to get the things I wanted. I didn’t care.

I’ve told you about the time I spent in counseling with a good psychologist — about 12 years ago — that completely changed me, so I’m not going to belabor all the things that sent me to her office.

In less than a year, I came to understand my father’s narcissism, then I suddenly understood much of my childhood, and then I had to confront how much of my father’s dysfunction had crept into my own life.

I had to face all of the attitudes and behaviors in me that were reflections of the training I had received from him. I had to accept the pain I had brought to people in my personal life because of my arrogance. And I had to deconstruct the dysfunctional false self that had become such a part of me from decades of walking through the world as a “superior creature.”

I plunged into fixing myself as I worked with this psychologist. I don’t know if I’ll ever repair every nook and cranny of my subconscious, but I know that I humbled myself and brought myself down. Way down.

Since I had lived with those dark characteristics all my life, I had no idea they were so tightly connected with my confidence about myself, much less with the success I’d experienced. If I had understood what fixing my flaws would do to me, I don’t know whether I would have had the courage to move forward.

Here’s what I finally understand. My arrogance and overconfidence gave me the courage and drive to do whatever came my way. They were a huge part of what had made me successful.

When I stripped myself of those dark characteristics, I changed. I saw the world in shades of gray. I wasn’t so eager to push past other people to get what I wanted. I cared whether I hurt people. I saw more of my flaws. I cared more about love and connection than I cared about success. And I understood that I was very capable of failure.

I’m a more loving person today. I’m more empathetic. I’m better at the intimacy that’s so important to love and connection.

But I question myself. I know I’m not always right. And I have a fear of failure which I never experienced when I was young.

I constantly tell people that everything in life is a tradeoff — and I strongly believe that. If you get more of one thing, you’re going to get less of something else. For every flaw a person has, there’s a corresponding positive. And for every shiny and beautiful thing a person has to offer to you, there are dark negatives lurking hidden within as compensation.

(Read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay called “Compensation” and then think about it for a long time very carefully.)

I don’t want to go back to being the person I once was. I don’t want to be arrogant to those I love. I don’t want to be dismissive of everyone around me. I like the growth I’ve experienced — and I like knowing that I can now love in a way that I couldn’t have loved 20 years ago.

All of that is true. It really is. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes recall how glorious I could feel on the inside back then. And it doesn’t mean there aren’t times when I miss the fruits of my old sins.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

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?

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