The Egotistical Utilitarian

If someone calls you self-centered, there’s often a negative connotation that comes with it. I think it’s past time we challenge that because the definition of the term is to be centered on yourself. That, I believe, is a net positive. It’s through trying to understand and accept yourself that you can then go out and help others. 

Doing that work is necessary, but it’s also very difficult when your world is so small. I think of it as pinging off of cell towers, whether it’s your parents, your closest friends, your job, your school, or some other institution that you're connected to. If you spend all of your time pinging off those things and constantly receiving data back and letting that pull you to your next move, you're not really finding your voice. Instead of triangulating off of others, you have to look within to come up with your goals. 

You can do that by reframing your focus on yourself, so that you center yourself and ultimately in the service of trying to do better for others. 

The actor Matthew McConaughey calls this work egotistical utilitarianism, and it’s a world view I’ve heard from other thinkers, too. But this framing in particular resonated with me, and I believe it’s useful for other people to both understand, and to embrace on their own terms.

--- 

I don’t know if the term “egotistical utilitarian” was invented by or just used by McConaughey, but I heard him talk first on a podcast with Tim Ferriss, and later through listening to his book, Green Light, which almost reads like poetry. He has a lot of thoughts about the world, and has thought very deeply about what is in his book, which he wrote in isolation in order to really focus. He also has some very interesting stories about his career, and how he had to fight and turn down romantic comedies before he began to get some of the most seminal work of his career.

He explained that, in its face, the idea of being an egotistical utilariarian is that usually if you're egotistical, you don't care about other people, and if you're utilitarian, you very much care about other people. I very much  like this idea of focusing on yourself to then give back, because it ties into the practice of focusing on your strengths and your sacrifice in service of then helping others. 

I particularly like this idea because it speaks pretty acutely to the idea of brand tension, which I learned about during my time at a major ad agency in New York City. Every year, Young & Rubicam would conduct a major study in which they would ask thousands of people what they thought about hundreds or even thousands brands, on scales such as approachable to elitist, and unfashionable to stylish. 

Target in particular was Young & Rubicam’s client, and the agency believed that by adopting some of the words that directly contrasted with what consumers thought about Target, they could slingshot the brand away from Walmart and other competitors, which were clustered as being approachable, a good bargain, a good value, and down-to-earth. By encouraging Target to start adopting words like stylish and fashionable, the brand had something of a reinvention: It was still affordable, yes, but it was also chic.

That is brand tension. Land Rover is a 4x4 rugged vehicle, but it's driven by suburban housewives. In the newest versions, Batman is very dark, but he's also a hero. It’s the idea that whether it's a person or a brand, having elements of your personality that seem in tension with one another actually makes you textured and interesting. In the same way, being an egotistical utilitarian is a tension of two words that shouldn't exist together yet when they do, they create a really interesting person. That's who McConaughey aspires to be, and who I aspire to be as well.

Being an egotistical utilitarian isn’t necessarily easy. I think it is really hard to be focused on yourself and focused on others simultaneously. I've definitely had moments where I've gone way too far in one direction or the other, and I think a lot of people meet me and they think that I would skew more egotistical than utilitarian. In reality, I skew more toward the utilitarian, often out of deep insecurity and wanting other people to like me. My natural instinct is to people-please and to steer pretty hard towards trying to make other people happy and give them exactly what they need.

Something I have realized, however, is that it is very easy to be liked but it's much harder to be respected, and to actually stand for something and say something. If you do that, some people will dislike you for putting a flag in the ground and some people will like you because of it. I spent a lot of time trying to get people to like me, and I now could really care less if people liked me. Instead, my goal is to work on myself and to say something worth saying so that some people respect me.

It’s only very recently that I've focused on myself, because you need to love yourself before you love someone else. By switching from being so outwardly focused and so worried about what other people think, I can acutely focus on what I need so that I can then go back out and be in better service of others.

The Danger of Being Too Egotistical

There is, of course, a danger that some people will only do half the work — that is to say, they are only out for themselves.

There's this political theory called the tragedy of the commons, in which there's this shared resource that benefits everyone, but it will always trend toward entropy. Take Central Park, which is beautiful  and free for so many people to use every day. But those same people tend to litter or otherwise trash the space little by little over time. The park towards entropy, which is to say that everyone has the subtle instinct to take from it and not give to it. Because of that, it will slowly degrade and get worse and worse and worse unless someone actively takes care of it.

I think people trend towards being selfish and taking a little bit more than they give. That’s why when you  often meet someone who you would describe as egotistical, they are focused on themselves to the point of taking more than they're than they're giving back. That will forever be the case for them. You want to be the kind of person who remembers where they came from, and who succeeds so that they can be in service of others, not so that they can be forever focused on themselves. 

So take the first step towards being an egotistical utilitarian: Be conservative with your time and efforts now, and liberal later.

Something else McConaughey talks about is the idea of “conservative now, liberal later.” It resonated with me because I've heard it about 10 times from other people, said in slightly different words. Jocko Willink, who's a Navy SEAL describes it as “discipline equals freedom.” There’s the idea of making your bed every morning, and of structure setting you free. 

Right now, I'm really focused on my personal finances, though I was less so in my twenties. At the time, I was living in New York City, which is expensive, and you tend to spend more of what you're making than someone in a city where the cost of living is a little lower. I was in the habit of sort of living pretty close to my means in my 20s, but in my 30s, I have pulled back quite a lot and tried to really focus on saving for the long term.

We all need structures and hierarchy, because we all need to know what is best and what is worst and how to proceed along that continuum to be our best. Exacting structure and adding a rubric can help free someone up. But without structure, we're all just floating around, existentially wondering where we're going and why, and what's good and what's bad. We all thrive when we have that discipline and structure, because it gives us the freedom to then just be.

I’ve found that as soon as you make up your mind that discipline equals freedom, you're quite hard on yourself when you have lapses. The work is never over, because it's when you think that you have finished the work that something comes in and kind of violates that progress, and you realize that you're never that far from the edge of the cliff. 

One of the most formative conversations I've ever had was the first conversation I ever had with Gary Vaynerchuk. Towards the end, he told me that the hardest day was when he shut the door and realized that it was the rest of his life, and that you can never get off the hamster wheel. In other terms, if you commit to a code and a way of being, you have to put in the work for upkeep forever. 

Entropy happens. Things degrade. There's constant upkeep and adherence to the code. You can never stop. And that can be a bit overwhelming when you realize that. But you can also treat it as a challenge to make the world better. You can focus on yourself so that you’re ready to give back as your fullest self, and to help the most people possible.