Free Yourself from your Old Self by Learning from “Breaking Bad”, Season 2, Episode 1

Walter and Jesse complete drug deal with Tuco but not before they watch their drug customer kill one of his henchmen, No-Doze, for presuming to speak for him. Tuco makes Walter use CPR on No-Doze but it’s not enough to bring him back from the dead. Hank and the police find bodies of both No-Doze and Gonzo at the site of the drug deal. Walter mistakenly thinks Tuco killed Gonzo because he was afraid he might tell the police who killed him. What really happened is that Gonzo bumped into a pile of cars when he was hiding the corpse. A car fell on him and he bled to death from the injury.

Walter decides to make ricin (a deadly poison) and slip that into a batch of meth to kill Tuco instead of trying to shoot him (like Jesse was planning). In a line oozing with irony, Walter says, “That degenerate snorts anything he gets his hands.”

Walter finally returns home after his day of drug deals and ricin making and before he explains to his wife Skyler just what he’s been doing all day, he hides Jesse’s gun and the drug money in a diaper box.  He’s about to answer her when his cellphone rings. It’s Jesse, who’s pulled up outside of Whites’ house. He moves out of ear shot of Skyler and asks Jesse why in the hell he’s outside their house as they have an agreement that if Jesse needs to contact Walter, it’s by phone only. Jesse tells Walter he has to come out to the car. He does but he doesn’t see Tuco in the back seat pointing a gun at Jesse until it’s too late. Tuco tells Walter to get in the car, which he does.

So ends “Seven Thirty-Seven”, a misleading name for the episode. It refers to the teaser at the beginning of the episode, which makes it seem like there was a meth-related explosion at the Whites’ house in a future episode. What it really shows is the aftermath of a mid-air collision caused partially by Jesse’s relationship and his role in the overdose of an air traffic controller’s daughter. One of the two airplanes involved in the mid-air collision was a 737. Whew, talk about a complex reason for naming an episode!

Anyway, this episode resonated with me because I can identify with Walter’s thought process during this show’s events. His reaction to thinking Tuco wanted to kill Jesse and himself could have been, “Okay, getting into the meth business to earn a ton of money in a short period of time to secure my family’s financial security after I’m dead from lung cancer, while it sounded like a good idea at the time, is really a bad idea. I’ve got a psychopathic business partner who killed a man in front of me and probably wants to kill me and my partner because we’re witnesses.”

So Walter could have told Hank that he knows who killed the two men that Hank and the cops found in the junkyard. The police arresting Tuco would have eliminated the threat to their lives. But Hank would have wanted to know how Walter knew about the killing and that would have required Walter to tell him he sold meth to Tuco. But he didn’t do it for a couple of reasons. Number One: His pride would have been hurt because he’d have to admit he sold a large amount of meth to Tuco. Hank would think less of Walter after learning what Walt had done.  Number Two: He’d have to quit making meth after confessing to Hank that he’d sold Tuco meth, which would mean he’d have to accept the possibility that Hank would have to help out his family financially after Walter’s death.

Alcoholics and addicts, like Walter White, put themselves in bad situations because of their actions. But instead of making a wise decision in a bad situation, they make things worse by refusing to admit it was their own foolish, unenlightened actions that put them in the bad situation to begin with. For me, after I got my first DWI in 2003, I could have heeded a major warning sign from God/the universe at large: ALCOHOL AND YOU DO NOT MIX. GET HELP IMMEDIATELY. But my pride countered with something like, “Get lost. I got the whole alcohol-use thing under control. No problem, here.”

In my mind, I didn’t see myself as having a problem with alcohol. So I got a DWI, it was just a one-time deal, a case of poor judgment on my part. The cops just happened to nail me. The thing about people who get a DWI is that most of them have problems with alcohol because the vast majority of people who drink and drive don’t get caught. It’s just the way it works. There so many violators of the law that it’s impossible for the police to catch more than a small percentage of them. So if you get one or more DWI’s, the odds are you’ve driven drunk many times without getting pulled over. But that’s not the way most people who get DWI’s think. It’s funny and sad, and very revealing of the ego’s subtle, demonic ways, to hear alcoholics discuss their arrests with others. Almost every one of them has an explanation that makes it sound like it’s the cops’ fault for unfairly pulling them over or that it was a fluke they got pulled over in the first place or that their BAC (Blood Alcohol Content) measurement was inaccurate. I’ve yet to hear a drunk say, “You know what, I was drunk and I got what I deserved.”

Walter is similar in that he wouldn’t admit he was wrong to go into the meth business. Even ignoring the immorality of the activity, even if he isn’t arrested by the authorities it’s a dangerous business that jeopardizes himself, his partner Jesse and the family he claims to want to protect. But his sense of stubborn pride blinds him to the feedback from God and the world at large that what he’s doing is a bad idea. Practicing alcoholics and addicts have the strongest sense of pride of anyone on the planet because if their pride wasn’t so strong, they’d admit they have a problem with alcohol/drugs and they need the help of others. In “Overcome Any Personal Obstacle, Including Alcoholism, By Understanding Your Ego” – — 

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/leewriter — I trace the root cause of all seven of The Seven Deadly Sins to an overly strong ego. Among the sins, the deadliest one is pride, the desire to be more important and attractive than everyone else (another definition is “excessive love of self in proportion to God). The opposite of pride is humility, which is the quality of being modest and respectful and in many philosophical traditions is connected with the transcendent unity of the universe or God. The humble person doesn’t necessarily believe they aren’t capable of doing great thing. Rather than they believe they can only do great things with the help of God and other people. A truly humble person has attained a sense of egolessness that allows them to view their own actions with perfect clarity. Conversely, the prideful person can’t the truth of their life because their pride is forever spinning and twisting the truth to make themselves appear better than they really are.

A Zen Buddhist master once said, “No ego, no problem.”

Live Free and Beyond Your Ego’s Constraints, Learn from Walter White in BREAKING BAD, Season 3, Episode 10 – “Fly”

For a complete summary, go to http://www.amctv.com and look up “Half Measures”. For the purposes of this blog, here’s the big stuff:

• Walt and Skyler negotiate how many family dinners they’ll have together. Walt argues the car wash cover will appear more plausible if the two of them appear to be reconciled.
• Jesse shows Walt the blue meth he bought from Tomas’ associates, which proves Gus uses children in his meth business. Jesse tells his partner that he plans to slip ricin into the hamburgers that Wendy, one of the rival drug dealers’ regular customers, will bring along when she makes her next meth purchase from them. Walt calls the plan ridiculous, that killing Combo’s killers accomplishes nothing. Jesse persists, says “I’m doin’ it with or without you.”
• Walt and Saul discuss options for dealing with Jesse. Saul rejects his client’s idea of getting Jesse arrested so he can cool his jets while sitting in a jail cell.
• Mike tells Walt about the time, when Mike was a beat cop, that instead of shooting a habitual wife abusing husband, he used a half measure (warned the guy if he didn’t stop beating his wife that Mike was going to shoot him dead). Before he follow through with his threat, the husband beat his wife so badly that he killed her. “No more half measures,” Mike tells Walt.
• Mike whisks Jesse off to factory farm for a meeting with Gus, Walt and the two drug dealers that had Tomas kill Combo. Gus concedes his employees may have acted rashly but Combo was selling in their territory. Jesse challenges the drug lord, says “This is how you do business?” Gus is irritated with Jesse’s insolence but he’s determined to find a solution. He says “no more children” and makes Jesse shake hands with the two dealers.
• Walter then hears a TV newscast report Tomas’ death as another casualty in the Albuquerque drug war. Concerned about what Jesse might do in reaction to the development, the senior meth partner suddenly leaves a family dinner.
• An armed Jesse strides toward same street corner where Combo was shot and Jesse bought blue meth from the formerly rival drug dealers (now they’re on the same team). The dealers, also armed and ready for a fight, stride toward Jesse. Walter suddenly shows up, runs over the dealers with his car, killing one and seriously injuring the other. Walt jumps out of the car, sees surviving dealer trying to reach his gun laying on the street. Walt grabs the gun, shoots man in the head and yells at Jesse: “Run.”

Analysis/Comments Gus’ willingness to use minors in his drug business shows a complete lack of empathy. Just as the ego is the basis of all of the Seven Deadly Sins, empathy is the basis of the Seven Virtues. As I see it, Gus’ primary Deadly Sins are pride and greed. His pride allows him to use whatever means he, Gus, deems necessary to get what he wants. If recruiting and using a ten-year-old boy to shoot another dealer that sells on your turf suits his needs, he does it without regard to how it affects the boy or the boy’s family. And it’s Gus’ greed, his lust for as much money as he can make from the drug trade, that causes him to employ minors. If Gus had more empathy and became humble (humility is the Virtue that  is the opposite Deadly Sin of greed), he would have consulted God about the use of kids in his meth business and decided it was not an acceptable practice. If Gus had more empathy and was charitable (opposite of Deadly Sin of greed), he’d get out of the meth business because he’d realize the highs he make possible for his customers are overshadowed by all the damage — physical, emotional and psychologically – his product causes. Another interesting (to me anyway) and revealing dialogue in this episode as it relates to the ego-centric mindset is the exchange between Walt and Jesse about the latter’s plan to use ricin to kill the two dealers who used Tomas to kill Combo. In my summary, I didn’t mention that Walter, after he calls the plan ridiculous, tells Jesse that they simply “lost a turf war” and killing Combo’s now accomplishes nothing. It’s easy for Walt to say that because A) he didn’t have a close friendship with Combo like Jesse did an, B) Walter is able to insulate himself from the dirty, seamy part of the meth business by confining his activities, for the most part, to the nice, clean, sterile environs of the lab (now a superlab) and C) Walt’s ego-centric nature means his view of the world results in sticking nice and tidy labels on everyone, labels that in his mind capture the essence of whomever he’s labeling. It’s like calling someone a drunk or addict. It’s an incomplete, untrue description that invites a stereotypical view of the person but it allows the ego the satisfaction of finding a box to put that person into. It’s nice and convenient, a pithy description that seems to define who that person is. But labels also allow the creator of the label to dehumanize the other person. It prevents any kind of genuine emotional connection with the person. Jesse is the one all the front line of the drug war, so to speak, while Walter/Heisenberg is the general who oversees the troop movements from a safe distance. Walt intellectually knows there are casualties but he doesn’t genuinely experience the gut-wrenching truth of the deaths from his command post. The label issue is one of things, along with my poor hearing, that keeps me from attending many AA meetings. Everyone states their name and says “I’m an alcoholic.” To me, that’s not empowering because of all the negative connotations associated with alcoholic. In AA’s view, admitting your addiction to alcohol is the first step in addressing your drinking problem. So I see what they’re doing but it just doesn’t inspire me to be sober. In my book, the 7^th Insight of Enlightenment is “Devise a plan but make it flexible”. So with my plan, initially it involved attending at least two or three AA meetings per week. But I found because of my tinnitus (ear ringing), I couldn’t hear about 85 to 90% of what was said. And as mentioned, the labeling issue also troubled me. So I took the AA meeting piece out of my recovery plan. Each person has to find the right recovery plan for themselves. I’m certainly not discouraging those in recovery from attending AA meetings. Their 12-step program has helped millions achieve sobriety. If you attend a few meetings and it helps you be sober, then definitely make that part of your recovery plan. For me, writing blogs and promoting my self-help book help me stay sober so that’s what I do. Note about the author of this blog: Lee A. Eide is a freelance writer from Red Wing, MN. This blog shows how to free one’s self from any obsession by living beyond the narrow confines of the ego. His book, “Overcome Any Personal Obstacle, Including Alcoholism, By Understanding Your Ego”, is available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/leewriter and on Amazon.com. Also available on Amazon.com and www.xlibris.com: “Dead Man’s Plan” – spiritual thriller that’s been described as “a unique and fascinating read” by Midwest Book Reviews and “a great, exciting story with well-developed character’s” by Mary E. Dana of SharpWriter magazine. Author’s website is http://www.leeeide-thewriter.com. Eide lives in Red Wing with his two cats, Shaggy II and Bander.

Transform Your Thinking, Learn How Not to Act/Think from Walter White, “BB”, Season 3, Episode 5 – “Mas”

For a complete summary, go to http://www.amctv.com/shows/breaking-bad/episodes/season-3/mas.

The big stuff that happens, as it relates to how Walter’s character arc relates to the principles from my book, “Overcome Any Personal Obstacle, Including Alcoholism, By Understanding Your Ego” — http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/leewriter — are that:

1. Jesse and Walt, as Gustavo no doubt planned, yell at each other about Walt getting Jesse’s share of the drug-deal money. Walt claims he didn’t deal with Gus behind Jesse’s back, which is true. Jesse yells “My meth, my money.”
2. Walt meets with Gus to iron out the situation, gives the drug kingpin a bad time for using Jesse to tempt Walt back into the meth business. Gus apologizes “for being so transparent”, then takes him for a ride into the desert where he shows Walt an industrial laundry.
3. Laundry is a cover for a meth superlab that although it impresses Walt, he doesn’t agree to cook meth because he’s already made too many bad decisions, to which Gus counters, “A man provides.  And he does it even when he’s not appreciated, or respected, or even loved.”
4. At Sleazeball Saul’s office, as Walt hands over Jesse’s share of the last drug deal, Walt declares, “That is the last money you’ll ever earn in this business. He adds Gus was only using Jesse to get to Walt. “I’m in, you’re out.”
5. Saul immediately switches allegiance from Jesse to Walt, asks for a money-laundering fee for the $3M he’s going to make from cooking for Gus. Jesse objects, says Saul is his lawyer, to which Saul quips, “That’s the way of the world, kid. You go with the winner.”

Like Saul was the devil in  “Better Call Saul” in Episode 8 of Season 2, Gustavo Fring tells Walt exactly what he wants to hear in order to manipulate him into cooking meth for him. And the thing is, Walt realizes exactly what’s happening. He’s being manipulated and he caves in anyway even though in some part of his mind, he knows it’s the wrong decision. It’s like when Charlie Brown backs and prepares to kick the football that Lucy holds. He’s told Lucy he’s not interested in doing it because he knows she’s going to pull the ball away at the last second. But Lucy assures him that’s not the case. This time she’s going to let him kick the ball. Despite his reservations and the trouble alarm that’s sounding somewhere in his mental and emotional infrastructure, Walt goes ahead and pulls the trigger on the cook deal with Gustavo.

In this case, it’s greed, pride and envy (three of the Seven Deadly Sins compliments of the ego-centric mindset) that cause Walter to accept Gus’s offer. He’s greedy to make $3M, prideful over his ability to cook kick-ass meth and envious that Jesse made money when Walter didn’t.

Saul jumps on the greed/Walter bandwagon, much to Jesse’s chagrin. The ego is all about short-term success — the flavor of the month club — forming alliances with people only if there’s a direct benefit to the ego’s owner.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In my book, I show readers how they can live beyond and above their ego, and thereby attain the Seven Virtues — http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-seven-virtues.htm#list-of-the-7-deadly-sins-on-a-chalkboard. The virtue opposite pride is humility, which is the belief one can achieve nothing on his own but with the help of God, anything is possible. The virtue opposite greed is charity, which is the unlimited loving kindness towards others. Lastly, the virtue opposite envy is is kindness, the act or the state of being kind, being marked by good and charitable behavior, pleasant disposition, and concern for others. When one realizes we’re all part of the One Life, then acting with humility, charity and kindness is a natural outgrowth of that philosophy. When you help others, you’re actually helping yourself.

NOTE: Some mistakenly associate humility with low self-confidence and low self-esteem. If we say he or she is just a humble servant, that implies they’re of a lower class of people, that they’re not as capable, smart or “good” as the rest of us. But that’s the correct definition. People with humility often achieve great things. The key is that if they do, they don’t take personal credit for it. They realize it’s only through God, and the help of others, and sometimes good fortune that they can achieve greatness. To the humble recovering alcoholic, you can keep living your life of sobriety but you can’t do it yourself. This the higher power that AA refers to in their 12-step program.

 

 

 

Free Yourself from the Prison of your Ego: Learn from Walter White’s Mistakes in BREAKING BAD, Season 3, Episode 4 – “Greenlight”

For complete summary of this episode, go to http://breakingbad.wikia.com/wiki/Green_Light

 The major events in the episode as they relate to Walter’s character arc and their relationship to my groundbreaking self-help book, “Overcome Any Personal Obstacle, Including Alcoholism, By Understanding Your Ego” — http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/leewriter — are as follows.

1. With Saul and Mike secretly listening, Skyler tells Walter that whether he stays or leaves the White house, they’re not married anymore.
2. Walter, livid over her affair with boss Ted, tries to confront Ted at the office, but is thrown out the front doors by three warehouse men.
3. Walter, having deduced his lawyer planted “bugs” at the house, makes Mike remove them. Mike comments, “You know, Walter, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to have someone watching your back.”
4. The school principal, due to his erratic behavior, places Walt on indefinite leave.
5. As Walt goes to his car after the news of his leave, Jesse shows his the blue meth Jesse made on his own, which Walter finds fault with, complains, “That is my product” and that his guy doesn’t work with junkies, only pros.
6. Gustavo, “Walt’s guy”, decides that after he hears Mike tell him Jesse and Walt aren’t getting along that Gus will go against his usual philosophy of not dealing with junkies and do the deal with Jesse anyway.
7. Jesse gets paid from the drug deal but receives only half the money.
8. Walter, at a traffic light, sees Victor (one of Gus’ henchmen) throw a bag of money into his car.

The ego-centric Walter’s envy, pride and anger, three out of the seven Deadly Sins, are on prominent display in “Greenlight”. In my book, I trace the root cause of all the deadly sins to an overly strong ego. Conversely, to achieve the Seven Virtues (opposite of the Seven Deadly Sins), one needs to adopt a more enlightened world view in which we are all part of the One Life, which means we’re all intimately connected on a fundamental, profound level. 

First off, it’s Walter’s pride and envy that boil to the surface when he nitpicks at the quality of the blue crystal Jesse made without any help from Walt. Even he’s decided, for the moment, to not cook meth, he doesn’t want Jesse to get any credit or financial rewards from cooking the blue crystal. He resents his partner’s potentially being able to profit from making meth without him.

And then it’s Walt’s anger that forces him to storm into Skyler’s workplace and go after her boss and lover, Ted. Walter doesn’t acknowledge that it was his criminal lifestyle that’s caused the emotional chasm between his wife and himself, thus making the affair possible in the first place. Instead of looking inward and learning from Skyler’s affair, he looks outward and strikes out at an easy target. The ego-based person treats its own (i.e. – the self) with kid gloves while is merciless with other people who become surrogate victims that hid the true source of the problem.

Mike’s comment to Walter as the former removes the bugs from the latter’s house, “…it doesn’t hurt to have someone watching your back,” hints at the danger of the ego-centric, “everyone is an island” philosophy. Pride assures the person they can handle things themselves but that’s not always true. If Mike hadn’t seen The Cousins enter the White house while Walter was in the shower, and then made a phone call that resulted in the assassins deciding to meet with Gus to discuss the planned assassination to avenge Tuco’s death, Walter would have been dead.

 

 

Live Free and Beyond Your Ego’s Constraints: Learn from Walter White in BREAKING BAD, Season 2, Episode 1 – “Seven Thirty-Seven”

Walter and Jesse complete drug deal with Tuco but not before they watch their drug customer kill one of his henchmen, No-Doze, for presuming to speak for him. Tuco makes Walter use CPR on No-Doze but it’s not enough to bring him back from the dead. Hank and the police find bodies of both No-Doze and Gonzo at the site of the drug deal. Walter mistakenly thinks Tuco killed Gonzo because he was afraid he might tell the police who killed him. What really happened is that Gonzo bumped into a pile of cars when he was hiding the corpse. A car fell on him and he bled to death from the injury.

Walter decides to make ricin (a deadly poison) and slip that into a batch of meth to kill Tuco instead of trying to shoot him (like Jesse was planning). In a line oozing with irony, Walter says, “That degenerate snorts anything he gets his hands on.”

Walter finally returns home after his day of drug deals and ricin making and before he explains to his wife Skyler just what he’s been doing all day, he hides Jesse’s gun and the drug money in a diaper box.  He’s about to answer her when his cellphone rings. It’s Jesse, who’s pulled up outside of Whites’ house. He moves out of ear shot of Skyler and asks Jesse why in the hell he’s outside their house as they have an agreement that if Jesse needs to contact Walter, it’s by phone only. Jesse tells Walter he has to come out to the car. He does but he doesn’t see Tuco in the back seat pointing a gun at Jesse until it’s too late. Tuco tells Walter to get in the car, which he does.

So ends “Seven Thirty-Seven”, a misleading name for the episode. It refers to the teaser at the beginning of the episode, which makes it seem like there was a meth-related explosion at the Whites’ house in a future episode. What it really shows is the aftermath of a mid-air collision caused partially by Jesse’s relationship and his role in the overdose of an air traffic controller’s daughter. One of the two airplanes involved in the mid-air collision was a 737. Whew, talk about a complex reason for naming an episode!

Anyway, this episode resonated with me because I can identify with Walter’s thought process during this show’s events. His reaction to thinking Tuco wanted to kill Jesse and himself could have been, “Okay, getting into the meth business to earn a ton of money in a short period of time to secure my family’s financial security after I’m dead from lung cancer, while it sounded like a good idea at the time, is really a bad idea. I’ve got a psychopathic business partner who killed a man in front of me and probably wants to kill me and my partner because we’re witnesses.”

So Walter could have told Hank that he knows who killed the two men that Hank and the cops found in the junkyard. The police arresting Tuco would have eliminated the threat to their lives. But Hank would have wanted to know how Walter knew about the killing and that would have required Walter to tell him he sold meth to Tuco. But he didn’t do it for a couple of reasons. Number One: His pride would have been hurt because he’d have to admit he sold a large amount of meth to Tuco. Hank would think less of Walter after learning what Walt had done.  Number Two: He’d have to quit making meth after confessing to Hank that he’d sold Tuco meth, which would mean he’d have to accept the possibility that Hank would have to help out his family financially after Walter’s death.

Alcoholics and addicts, like Walter White, put themselves in bad situations because of their actions. But instead of making a wise decision in a bad situation, they make things worse by refusing to admit it was their own foolish, unenlightened actions that put them in the bad situation to begin with. For me, after I got my first DWI in 2003, I could have heeded a major warning sign from God/the universe at large: ALCOHOL AND YOU DO NOT MIX. GET HELP IMMEDIATELY. But my pride countered with something like, “Get lost. I got the whole alcohol-use thing under control. No problem, here.”

In my mind, I didn’t see myself as having a problem with alcohol. So I got a DWI, it was just a one-time deal, a case of poor judgment on my part. The cops just happened to nail me. The thing about people who get a DWI is that most of them have problems with alcohol because the vast majority of people who drink and drive don’t get caught. It’s just the way it works. There so many violators of the law that it’s impossible for the police to catch more than a small percentage of them. So if you get one or more DWI’s, the odds are you’ve driven drunk many times without getting pulled over. But that’s not the way most people who get DWI’s think. It’s funny and sad, and very revealing of the ego’s subtle, demonic ways, to hear alcoholics discuss their arrests with others. Almost every one of them has an explanation that makes it sound like it’s the cops’ fault for unfairly pulling them over or that it was a fluke they got pulled over in the first place or that their BAC (Blood Alcohol Content) measurement was inaccurate. I’ve yet to hear a drunk say, “You know what, I was drunk and I got what I deserved.”

Walter is similar in that he wouldn’t admit he was wrong to go into the meth business. Even ignoring the immorality of the activity, even if he isn’t arrested by the authorities it’s a dangerous business that jeopardizes himself, his partner Jesse and the family he claims to want to protect. But his sense of stubborn pride blinds him to the feedback from God and the world at large that what he’s doing is a bad idea. Practicing alcoholics and addicts have the strongest sense of pride of anyone on the planet because if their pride wasn’t so strong, they’d admit they have a problem with alcohol/drugs and they need the help of others. In “Overcome Any Personal Obstacle, Including Alcoholism, By Understanding Your Ego” – — 

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/leewriter — I trace the root cause of all seven of The Seven Deadly Sins to an overly strong ego. Among the sins, the deadliest one is pride, the desire to be more important and attractive than everyone else (another definition is “excessive love of self in proportion to God). The opposite of pride is humility, which is the quality of being modest and respectful and in many philosophical traditions is connected with the transcendent unity of the universe or God. The humble person doesn’t necessarily believe they aren’t capable of doing great things. Rather than they believe they can only do great things with the help of God and other people. A truly humble person has attained a sense of egolessness that allows them to view their own actions with perfect clarity. Conversely, the prideful person can’t the truth of their life because their pride is forever spinning and twisting the truth to make themselves appear better than they really are.

A Zen Buddhist master once said, “No ego, no problem.”