… success is heady stuff, knowledge is heady stuff and so is hard work. It gets to our head if we are not careful, we do and say ridiculous things and become oblivious to our strench. Unfortunately along the way we acquire sycophants, adherent followers, who can not tell us the truth, hailing us irrespective of the monster we are slowly becoming and yes without knowing or intending to, we attract the terrible twin into our lives, Pride and Arrogance! The point is that we can never tell if they have always been there and only emerge when we are at the height of our game, or if it is success that attracts them. But one thing is for sure, without any doubt they are the little foxes that spoil the vine, the dead flies that cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour. Both men and women of weak disposition embraces these terrible twin and go around trampling on those they consider beneath them. ‘Consider’ being the operative word as these people are rarely beneath them! Unable to see their blind shoulders and without any visual aids they bump and crash into things they need not crash into.
Al Pacino, in one of his movies, kept repeating the line about how hard he worked for his money. It is interesting how people in what we consider unsavoury profession still have their sense of moral. I remember his wife saying something along the line of “I wish you didn’t have to work so hard for your money and someone gave it to you”. How many times have husbands come home night after night terrorising the wife and hammering it into her head how he has gone out to work hard to put food on the table? How many times have some women drum it into their children’s head how hard it has been to bring them into this world? How many times have some proprietors/ business owners tell their employees their story and how hard they work to build their business? How many times have some ministers work it into their sermon, the price they have had to pay for their anointing, the hard work that was involved? Hard work is a beast, an insatiable one that can sometimes demand unrelenting acknowledgement and validation. Yes, some, if not all of these people have worked and some are still working excruciatingly hard for everything they have and deserve to be recognised, but at some point we have to let people be and not force feed every details of the effort we put into what we do and what we are.
I know a guy, I will call him Mike, I have known him for a very long time, hard working, incredibly knowledgeable in his field and he does have some success. Someone, I must admit I have come to respect as being quite giving and selfless, I knew him from afar though. Not too long ago, I had a direct dealing with Mike and I notice an ever so slight whiff of arrogance and dissmissiveness. I thought it could not be, it must be my nose picking up non existent odor, so I paid no attention and allowed it to go, but somehow it stuck at the very back of my mind. More recently I had another dealing with Mike and sadly it was no longer a whiff, it was a full fledge stench of pride and arrogance. An attitude of ‘I know it all, I am the most knowledgeable, I am not even going to try to know who you are, I am the Almighty Mike’. It was truly difficult to swallow or breath. In my mind, I couldn’t help wondering, how did things get to this stage? how? Has Mike always been like this? Where did the terrible twin come from? My take away from the experience is to watch my steps, my ways, no person is that successful, that knowledgeable, worked that hard to trample on other people. The Terrible twin is no man’s friend.
Stay clear of Pride and Arrogance!
Beautiful Ivory 