A man walks into a crowded room. For the next hour, he thinks, “I hope everyone notices me.” Across the room, another man walks in. For the next hour, he thinks, “I hope nobody notices me.” One appears arrogant. The other appears insecure. One desperately wants attention. The other desperately wants to avoid it. At first glance, they seem like complete opposites. But look more carefully. They are engaged in very similar behavior. Both spent the entire evening thinking about the exact same person: themselves. That is the ego’s greatest trick.
Most people think the ego has only one strategy: to convince us that we’re perfect, that we are better than others. But the ego is much smarter than that. If it can’t persuade you that you’re better than everyone else, it will gladly persuade you that you’re worthless. It doesn’t care which story you believe. It only cares that you keep thinking about yourself. Whether your ego whispers, “I’m better than everyone else,” or whispers, “I’m hopeless,” it has accomplished exactly what it wanted. Your attention never left you.
Think about how often this happens. You oversleep. Instead of asking, “Why did I oversleep?” you immediately ask, “What’s wrong with me?” You lose your temper. Instead of asking, “How do I make this right?” you ask, “Why am I such an awful person?” You fail an exam. Instead of asking, “How should I study differently?” you immediately conclude, “I’m just not smart enough.”
Notice what happened. The real issue was your behavior, your habits, your decisions. But without you even noticing, the ego changed the subject completely. Now the subject is not your habits. The subject instead is you. Once that happens, growth becomes much more difficult. The ego wins every time. It convinces you to assess yourself instead of your actions. The ego wants your attention to remain on yourself: your worth, your image, your reputation, your value. Ego loves you to think about that.
Life is asking something entirely different. Life is not asking, “Who am I?” or “What am I?” But rather, life is asking one simple question: “What needs to be done next?” Life isn’t asking you to figure yourself out. Life instead is asking you to give yourself a way to serve, to build, to create, to help, to repair, to love. The opposite of arrogance is not thinking poorly of yourself. It is thinking less about yourself and more about what needs to be done.
I read this and said, “Wow.” That’s how I opened it, because most of us spend a lot of our time and a lot of our thoughts saying, “Am I doing good? Am I not doing good? I’m doing terrible. I can’t believe this. I’m the worst. I’m the best.” Hashem doesn’t matter if you’re the worst or the best. Hashem will figure that out. You will never be able in this lifetime to figure out if you’re the worst or the best. You know how many people walking around the streets think they’re the best and they have no idea what’s coming? And you never know how many people walk around thinking they’re the worst, and it turns out they’re halfway to Mashiach. They’re unbelievable. Instead, our thoughts are not supposed to be busy with “I’m the worst” or “I’m the best.” Our thoughts instead have to be about what I need to do next.
The sound Malchuyot means, “Hashem, you are my king.” Zichronot means, “You remember me.” We have a relationship, and the sound the shofar is a call to action. When the Rambam says shofar means “wake up,” it means wake up and figure out what needs to be done from you next. That’s the question: What do I need to do next? Not “I’m the worst,” not “I’m the best,” not “I could have been,” “I should have been,” “I’m making a mistake,” “I’m a mess,” “I’m great,” “I’m not great.” Irrelevant conversations. Conversations also, by the way, that you’ll never figure out. There’s not a person in this room, including me, who has any idea at all whether we’re doing great or doing terrible. No one knows. You don’t know what your potential was. You don’t know where you could have been, where you should have been, where you were, where you weren’t, or what your scars of your childhood... I have no idea. I have no idea, and you have no idea. Well, you have one thing you do know, and one thing that is easiest for you to figure out: what needs to get done next.