The Art of Being Ruthless

by Michael Sloan

  False Assumption Three: I don’t want to hurt feelings

  It’s time to be really brutally honest with you. If you’re someone who says you don’t want to hurt feelings, that’s not actually true. The truth is that you don’t want to feel the emotional pain that comes from causing other people pain. You don’t want to deal with the guilt, emotional turmoil and anxiety that comes with hurting other people’s feelings. If we were able to hurt someone’s feelings with a clean conscious, there is a pretty big chance that we would do it.

  So, what do we do with this ugly truth? We own up to it! It’s not our job to preserve other people’s feelings when those other people don’t care about how you feel. An abusive boss doesn’t care about you. A spouse who’s always cutting you down isn’t concerned with how you feel. Why should you have to worry about not stepping on other people’s toes when those same people have no qualms about stepping on yours?

  Many times, we look to avoid conflict because we are actually quite unsure about ourselves. We are afraid of getting our own feelings hurt and seek to hide from such confrontations. Then, we are forced to endure abuse from our co-workers, friends and employers. We fear speaking up when the boss calls us in to work late, we fear telling our spouse how we feel when they insult us and we don’t tell a friend about his obvious drinking problem because we are afraid of his reaction.

  The reality is that we don’t want to have our feelings hurt. It has nothing to do with hurting other people’s feelings. The sooner you can embrace that, the sooner you can get over that hurdle. If the only thing keeping you from speaking your mind is the fear and anguish of conflict, then it has nothing to do with the other person. It has everything to do with you and how you perceive conflict.

  Don’t fall into the idea that you are being nice because you are letting people walk all over you. There is nothing wrong with being nice, there’s nothing wrong with doing good things for other people and there’s certainly nothing wrong with loving others, but choosing to avoid conflict because you fear the consequences isn’t nice at all. It is just a trained response to fear.

  You have to take a hard look at your own self and ask yourself: am I a coward or am I considerate? Considerate individuals don’t resent the people they help. Considerate people don’t do things out of obligation, guilt or frustration. Considerate people do things out of love and compassion and guess what? If you don’t have that love and compassion in your heart, then you’re not considerate. So, what does that leave you as? It leaves you as someone who is refusing to step up to the plate and actually handle the problems in your life. It’s harsh, but this is a book about being ruthless and part of ruthlessness is brutal honesty.

  Fatal Assumption Four: I’m Just a Nice Guy!

  A lot of times, we can characterize our weaknesses and our fear as being a nice guy. This is an insidious situation because it allows us to feel a smug sense of satisfaction in our own weakness. We look at the fact that we are doormats and believe that the reason we are constantly abused and stepped on is because we’re just nice guys. The reality is that we are not nice guys, the reality is that we are just weak. If you really want to test whether you are a nice guy or just a weakling, ask yourself this: do you believe that nice guys finish last?

  Nice guy syndrome is just another way of being compliant in society and worst of all it transfers the blame onto other people. This is where the idea that only bad people get ahead comes from. The idea that nice guys finish last is usually deeply seated in jealousy, envy and frustration at one’s own inability to achieve their own goals.

  The “nice guy” is nothing more than an artificial construct. He is a fantasy creation made to blame other people for his own failures. The nice guy reasons that the reason that he has fallen behind in life is because he is nice. He believes that everyone else around him is a bad person and that their immoral actions are why they succeed. In reality, the nice guy is living in his own little adolescent fantasy world. He has no one else to blame for his predicament other than himself, but he doesn’t see it that way. Instead, he’s always pointing the finger at someone else, lamenting his niceness as being the reason why he can never get ahead.

  The truth is that the nice guy can never get ahead because he is ultimately just a weak individual trying to justify his weakness. The ruthless individual doesn’t cry and whine about how other people are doing better than him, the ruthless individual sets his mind to actually doing something about his own life.

  The nice guy is a victim. Everything is always someone else’s fault. He’s just trying to get by, can’t you see? Shouldn’t you feel bad for the nice guy? After all he’s nice! This victim mentality leaves someone with nice guy syndrome incapable of actually become a responsible adult in his life.

  The ruthless individual is a victor, not a victim. He doesn’t worry about the things that he cannot change. He doesn’t focus on everyone else, he focuses on himself and tries to figure out how to best improve his own life, with little regard to who is or isn’t “nice.”

  The nice guy must learn to realize that he isn’t a failure in life because he is “nice.” He is a failure because he is limiting himself by transferring the blame onto other people. It’s better to accept this as true now and fix that mentality than it is to continue living that way forever.

  Having spent enough time talking about these fatal assumptions, let’s move on to the next chapter. This is where we are will be discussing how to be ruthless with yourself. There are a lot of falsehoods that we have believed all of our lives. If you want to be bold, courageous and in control of your own life, you are going to have to learn to cut the ties that bind you. And those ties are cut by learning to be ruthless with your own self.

  Chapter 2: Ruthless with Yourself

  So, do you want to be ruthless? Are you really willing to look at your own self objectively and make some harsh judgments? The first step to being ruthless is looking at your own life and making some tough choices about the way you live it. It’s not easy being introspective, especially when you’re looking for things that are wrong with you. But if you want to become ruthless, if you want to learn how to live your life with boldness and confidence, you’re going to have to make the decision to look inward.

  Introspection is your friend. In our modern-day world, we often aren’t very introspective. We don’t really think about what is going on internally and we don’t think about why we act the way we do. Instead we tend to just think about the now. We don’t look at the past enough to realize our own flaws and failures, we only focus on the present and sometimes dream about the future. Yet when we give up introspection, we are giving up a huge part of our lives. We are giving up something that is of utmost value and importance: we are giving up the ability to change ourselves.

  Changing yourself is possible, not very easy, but it is possible. All it takes is a willingness to look inward and see your own flaws, regardless of how uncomfortable that makes you feel. A lot of times though, we can just blame other people for our problems. This is where ruthlessness needs to come in. If we look at our own lives, if we look at our own actions and choices with a ruthless lens, we can see how we are at fault. If you don’t want to be at fault, you’re in trouble because you’re really not going to change. If a problem is always someone else’s fault, you are giving up responsibility. You’re not going to be someone who’s able to change the circumstances in your life because you believe these problems are caused by other people.

  Imagine that there is a man who is walking down the side of the road. This man trips and falls in a hole. Well, he gets up and dusts himself off and says “my shoes must’ve caused me to fall into that manhole!” So, the next day he’s out walking down the same street and sure enough the same hole is there. This time he trips and falls into the hole again. He gets out of the hole, dusts himself off, looks at traffic and says “I was so distracted by the cars driving by that I didn’t see the hole! Those cars are the problem.” Well, the third day he’s walk
ing down that same street and sure enough he trips and falls in the same hole, but this time he breaks his ankle. He says “why did the weather cause me to fall into this hole? If it had been a sunny day I would’ve seen the hole, so it’s the weather’s fault.”

  This is absurd correct? If the man had said “I think I’m the reason why I keep falling into this hole,” and instead chose to walk down a different street, he wouldn’t have broken his ankle. But by choosing to blame every little thing in his life except for his own choices, the choices that led him down that specific roadway, he’s denying himself the ability to be free. Free from what? Free from his own poor decisions!

  If you want to be free from your own poor decisions, if you want be free from the things that are holding you back, then you’re going to have to acknowledge that you have been part of the problem! It can be a little bit painful, it can be somewhat unpleasant but it’s worth it. Let’s face some harsh facts. You might be at a point in your life where you are unhappy. Whose fault is this? You can point at anyone else, you can point at your parents, your friends, your boss, and even your animals if you’re really desperate, but until you learn to point the finger at yourself, until you can sit in front of the mirror and say “I did this to myself,” you will never be free.

  There’s a brutality in this choice, of course, but it’s a good brutality. You’ve got to be brutally honest with yourself. One of the greatest losses that we’ve had in this modern society is the loss of telling the truth. People who speak the truth are usually seen as cruel, mean, or rude. If a woman says “does this dress make me look ugly?” those who say “yes,” will be punished by society. We are expected to just agree that it looks great on her and flatter her ego. Then you allow this woman to go out into public wearing a hideous dress that looks terrible on her and everyone else keeps quiet. No one tells her how hideous it is but everyone around her thinks about how terrible she looks. They feel nervous about someone saying something mean to her because of it. But no one is willing to tell her that her dress is hideous!

  Now imagine that the ugly thing isn’t a dress. Imagine that this is some major character flaw and no one around you is willing to tell you about it. How would you feel about those people? Chances are if you find that you have some kind of character flaw, you most likely want to improve it. But if no one tells you what you’re doing wrong, you’re never going to improve! Our society of being nice, our society of hiding the truth from other people has led us to live a life where we are isolated from any constructive criticism. Of course, these people are perfectly willing to talk bad about us behind our backs. They are willing to harm us emotionally, and they’re willing to judge us for our decisions but who among us is willing to take someone aside and say “hey, you’re doing something wrong. Here’s how you can do it better.” Instead, we live in a culture of backbiting and silence.

  So, you’re on your own for the most part, unless you can end up in a good culture of people who are willing to help you learn about your flaws. So how do we learn about our own shortcomings? Well, we learn about them by looking inward and asking ourselves some key questions. Let’s go over a list of key questions that will help you learn more about your own shortcomings and allow you to ruthlessly deal with them.

  Question one: Is it my fault?

  We live in a world where blame is often passed around as quickly as possible. We try to blame anyone and everyone for our shortcomings and problems. When the company has failings, no one wants to be caught with the hot potato that is called fault. They throw this fault around from department to department until finally someone takes the blame. And what happens when they take the blame? They get fired. And why do they get fired for making a mistake? Because of the compliance based society that we live in! We live in a society where compliance is required, where failure is punished and success is rewarded. So, whenever a failure happens, it is ingrained into us that we must do whatever it takes to avoid dealing with the consequences of that failure.

  When someone fails inside of a company, they are usually prosecuted to the fullest that a company can prosecute. The failed employee is shamed, they are blamed, they are told that this is the last straw and they are threatened. Worst of all, they are taught to never make a mistake. But is this really possible? Can we actually live a life where we don’t make mistakes? No, not at all! Anyone who tries to hide their mistakes is doing so because they fear punishment. A mistake isn’t a bad thing because we learn from our mistakes. But when we live in a compliance driven society, you have to do good things in order to be revered, mistakes are the worst possible thing.

  This is problematic if you want to grow. When you cast blame on someone else, you are giving up the ability to learn from your own mistakes. You are transferring responsibility from yourself to someone else. And you can’t really learn from someone else’s mistakes. Just like the man who blamed everything except for his own decision to walk down a sidewalk with a big old hole in it, when we choose to blame other people, we are condemning ourselves to walking down the path that has ruined us before. This is why we often see people who can never seem to get ahead in life. This is why we usually see people who are often confused, frustrated, sad or angry about their position in life. These people rant and rave, claiming that the whole system is rigged, but they always make the same mistakes day in and day out. When you give up your opportunities to learn from your own mistakes by doling out blame, you are condemning yourself to never being able to grow.

  So, this puts you in a position where you’re going to have to ask yourself some hard questions when you are in the wrong. Ignore the sting and stigma of being wrong. It’s okay to make mistakes, it’s okay to do things poorly. The point of a mistake is they are meant to help you learn to grow, they are meant to allow you to push yourself forward. If we are willing, we can learn valuable lessons from mistakes that will follow us for the rest of our lives. We do not learn from our successes. You must be willing to reject everything that you have been taught up to this point. You must be willing to reject the notion that in order to be good you need to be compliant. You’re better off failing 100 times and learning 100 different lessons than you are having one big success in your life. That one big success in your life will get you somewhere good but it will not help you stay there. Failure leads to character development, if it’s treated right. Failure swept under a rug, failure pushed away and hidden from sight will ultimately just lead you to continue the same habits that have led you to your continual struggles.

  So, you’re going to need to be honest with yourself and ask if you are the reason why you aren’t successful. You might’ve made some very poor decisions growing up. You may have taken on debt that you shouldn’t have, you may have partied your golden years away, you may have even invested in something that was a terrible decision. You might have spent way too much time in college or you might not have gone to college. It does you no good to refuse to accept these facts. The first step to being ruthless is being ruthlessly honest with yourself and if you cannot be honest, then you’re never going to get better. You’re never going to become strong and courageous.

  On the flipside if you do decide to accept responsibility for where you are with your life, you will find that you are in a far better position than most other people. This gives you the ability to learn from your mistakes. You can honestly ask yourself “am I at this job because the economy is so bad or because I have failed to secure a better job?” Admitting that you have failed to secure a better job might sting more, but it gives you the ability to correct the problem. That lesson is worth far more than blaming the economy. The economy is always going to be a problem for someone somewhere. It’s the winners in life who choose to work in spite of the circumstances around them.

  So, ask yourself this question very seriously: am I at fault? Then answer that question with honesty, if you feel like you haven’t been really honest with yourself, now’s the time to start! Once you identify your faults, you are able to change the
m! But until you identify your faults, you can’t really change them. You must be willing to change

  Question two: how did I get here?

  Now comes the next question: how did I get here? You asked if you were at fault and you found out that yes, you are at fault for the unpleasant things in your life. Now you have to learn how you became this way. So, if you are a spendthrift, you are going to have to ask yourself why do you spend so much money? You have to ask yourself: how did you become this person? You have to learn why you are the way you are. Are you undisciplined? Do you struggle with an understanding of certain things? Do you not know how to be good with your money? All of these questions are meant to help you become educated about your own flaws, they aren’t meant to condemn you. It’s easy to point and condemn. It’s easy to be judgmental about your shortcomings and it’s easy to self loathe and hate yourself, but the whole point of asking these questions isn’t to be judgmental, rather it is about learning how to correct your problems. Once you can correct these issues in your life, once you can learn to cut them out with ruthlessness and brutality, you will become a much stronger person.

  Question three: what do I want to be?

  It’s easy enough to ask yourself how you got there and to ask if you’re responsible, but it doesn’t end there. You now have to ask yourself what you want to be. If you have been compliant and beholden for your entire life, ask yourself if you want to still be that way. If you’ve been manipulated, controlled or trapped, ask yourself if that’s what you want to be. If you want to be strong, confident and courageous, it must be a conscious decision on your part. No one becomes stronger and more confident due to an accident.