Someone's Got to be the Asshole

You continue to give your love to the world (in the form of feedback), knowing full well that you’re going to get called an asshole for it.

“Someone’s got to be the asshole…”

And you’re willing to do that.

It would actually be pretty noble, if you weren’t such an asshole about it.

In order to keep giving your gifts to the world, you have to harden yourself.

You develop strong callouses around the part of your heart that hates the fact that you’re seen this way.

You become immune to this framing, able to stand in the face of it and still deliver the wisdom that you know only you can provide.

Over time, you became completely immunized from this flavour of feedback.

You’ve achieved it — the ability to deliver the feedback only you can, and to be untouched by whatever response you get back (so that you can keep doing it).

Your teflon coating that makes you immune to these responses also takes away your ability to feel empathy.

You lose your ability to feel the impact of your own words.

You’ve created a world in which you never really have to be accountable to your actions.

Because you can’t.

You’ve robbed yourself of the ability to feel other people — stolen from yourself the ability to be present to your impact.

(Sidebar: Consider the impact this has on how fulfilled you feel in your life).

The problem is over there, with those people that just can’t handle your love.

You’ve become the caricature, snapping your fingers, waggling your neck back and forth and saying “Look, I’m a truth-teller — I’m going to say what I’m going to say, and if you can’t handle that, that’s not my fault"

It turns out, most people are uninterested in handling that.

As you age, more and more people decide that the way you tell truth is a one-way path.

Your truth gets sprayed all over us, but you’re not really interested or open in hearing back our truth about how you’re showing up.

It’s safer this way, but that’s because intimacy is unsafe.

If you really want to impact people, that requires letting them impact you.

You walk around either spraying yourself everywhere, or keeping your heart under lock and key, denying us the beautiful light that only you can shine.

Your leadership suffers — people either feel ripped off because we don’t get to hear how you feel, or we walk on eggshells around you. We’re only safe when you’re giving someone else your shitty truth.

(Don’t worry, you mercifully can’t see this, for the same reason that you can no longer feel your own impact).

Neither of these solutions work, because they’re both designed to avoid you being perceived (or having to feel like) you’re an asshole.

And if you’re really committed to radically loving and leading the world, you will, at times, be perceived as an asshole.

Not because other people are broken. Not because what you intended didn’t come from love.

Simply because there will always be new edges for you to push into — and as you learn to push into those edges, you’ll be clumsy.

They’ll experience you as heartless, even if what you intended was from the most open of hearts.

Your job isn’t to avoid getting this feedback.

(Finding ways to soften it or render yourself immune to it are just more ways of avoiding it).

It’s to lean in to life in such a way that you welcome this feedback, and then use it to better your art.

To use this feedback to better your leadership.

If you really let yourself feel it, there’s a heartbreak that exists in the gap between what you intended and how you were received.

Your leadership is directly correlated to your ability to stay in that gap — to let yourself experience that heartbreak, and to stay open inside the hurt that causes you.

If you really want to lead from love, you’re going to have your heartbroken.

But perhaps you’d prefer to work on snapping your fingers louder.

(If you do it loud enough, you won’t even hear them utter the word “asshole” under their breath).