Steak or Doughnuts: The Deceptive Allure of Heuristic Pride

A Tale Of Two Prides: How To Shift From Seeking Validation To Creating True Success

Let's be straight here: if you were given a choice between organic, grass-fed medium-rare steak or pile of the Chocolate Dreamcake Krispy Kreme doughnuts - what would you choose?

Ahem... What would you choose if no one was judging?

We're constantly being served the choices between what's actually good and nourishing for us VS what just feels good and nourishing at the time.

And nowhere is this more visible than (drumroll for the grand entrance effect, please) - social media.

And a lot of social media is all about influence.

Let's take a trip back to ancestral times we're all running barefoot on the planes of wilderness with our hairy butts, chests and faces for the world to admire - aren't you just delighted with that mental image?

If you had more of the influence and status you would have a survival advantage right?

It could get you more food.

It could get you out of crappy menial labour that's just going to burn calories.

It almost definitely got you more attractive mates.

We're evolutionary wired for status and influence.

Now in the good, old, hairy days, there's no way we could influence as many people as we can today. Right? (Unless you're like Jesus and you're a real thing in which case you might)

Influence has been put at massive scale via social media.

You can create one timely reel and if it goes viral, it can change millions of people. And that gives you ancestorialy unmatched status. And a serious serving of pride.

Pride is an emotion that tells you to feel good about yourself when you accomplish something.

In the book "Pride: The Secret of Success" Jessica Tracy talks about two types of pride. There's authentic pride and heuristic pride.

1. Authentic pride. You feel this good feeling after you've done something. No matter if someone sees what you've done or not - you feel great. Now, if someone sees what you've done, that's even better, double whammy of dopamine.

2. Heuristic pride is different. It's promoting yourself as a way to boost your status. This is more about the smoke screen of influence without doing anything meaningful to achieve it. It still feels good.

And here lies the problem...

In the past, it was much easier to call out the heuristic pride because everyone knew each other in the towns and neighbourhoods we lived in. You knew exactly what Miranda three doors down was up to.

Social media disrupted that. It allows us to feel like we have influence, it makes us feel pride without necessarily being worthy of it.

It allows us to have obligation- and effort-free status.

But much like that pile of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, although it feels so damn marvellous at the time, long term it's just a shallow recognition. It might just as well be a worn-out micro-dopamine button we're addicted to pressing over and over again.

We don't just want to be successful, we want to be seen as successful.

The authentic pride that comes from the actual achievement beats that.

That's what I'll always be encouraging you to do - instead of focussing on the heuristics pride and feeling ohh-so-important on social media, take all of this energy and dump it into doing important work, making passive income and living a good life in your newly found free time.

Being devilishly successful, beats being seen as successful.

Always.

Kat