What does it mean to be a narcisist

Narcissist are not necessarily in love with themselves, like in the Greek myth of Narcis where the beautiful young man falls in love and becomes obsessed of his own reflection.

You don't have to be perfect in a certain area of your life to be a narcissist, quite the opposite narcissists are often in a severe lack of skill and competence. As they have a higher perception of their skills then they have in reality, this prevents them from developing any real skills.

Narcissism is really a form of denial, of two of the inescapable facts of life: the fact that you can always lose control and the fact that you can always fail no matter what the level of your skill is or how well prepare you are.

This is why generally speaking competence is characterized by humility and a certain degree of self doubt, not arrogance. In order to develop competence you have to fail at the same thing over and over again, which keeps you very grounded. During this process you learn how vulnerable you are.

Narcissists pretend that they are very good at something to avoid the failure that would come out of testing themselves in some real way, which would probably end up in failure. It is a form of avoidance of failure. Whenever they stubble upon any failure they ask themselves: "why me, what have I done to deserve this?" like they were promise some sort of immunity to any adversity.

Generally speaking narcissist grew up as neglected children, suffered either from physical neglect, like not enough food, clothes, present parents etc. or emotional neglect, like if you grew up without being allowed to express certain emotions or as a trophy child etc.

Whenever there are not enough people around you to care of you, it makes sense that you develop an increased inters in to yourself because nobody else does. It is a protection device, a pathological adaptation of your self preservation.

The opposite of narcissism is humility, which is the belief that you are of not any significant importance, it is having an accurate perception of reality by taking in consideration all the three possible scenarios that could happen to you in any given situation: fail to try, try and fail or try and succeed.

Humility is not a personality trait, it is something you practice, you can become more humble by trying to improve at something that you find important, and during that process it is very likely that you will encounter a lot of failure, and that failure is going to teach you who you really are.

The good news is that everybody can be humble and that there are great benefits that come from it. In my opinion humility is the first step you need to take in order to get out of a rut. Without humility you are not even going to try, because you are to afraid to fail, when you are humble you know that failure is a certainty so you got nothing to lose.