Getting what we really want

Many of us are unable to attain prosperity due to some feeling of personal inadequacy, what human behavior experts call inferiority complex. But such crap is a flimsy excuse for failure. Many a time, people are propelled to success and glory by the same reasons that hinder others from progressing.

Famous Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler believed that no one succeeds without a certain feeling of personal lack; that no one succeeds in spite of an inferiority complex, but because of it. According to Adler, discontent in certain aspects of one’s personality prompts many to strive for self-improvement, and attain self-excellence.

Adler’s own life was his very basis for his theory. As a small boy, he awoke one morning to find his brother dead in bed beside him. He felt so frustrated that, at that time, he could do nothing to help his brother. From that terrible experience, Adler wanted to become a doctor—so that he might fight death.

After earning a general medical degree, Adler became a famous psychologist and psychiatrist. For a time, he was associated with Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Later on, however, Adler deviated from the Freudian theory of human personality and developed his own.

In his book The Theory and Practice of Individual Psychology, Adler analyzed individual development to be motivated by a sense of inferiority, rather than by sexual drives as postulated by Freud. According to Adler, conscious or subconscious feelings of inferiority (since known as inferiority complex), are the driving forces of human behavior.

A perception of self-deficiency, Adler stressed, combines with the individual’s compensatory survival and defense mechanisms, prompting the person to try to perform better, so he may overcome his sensed shortcomings. True enough, there have been innumerable cases to support Adler’s contention.

The great Greek orator Demosthenes suffered from terrible stuttering as a child. In order to overcome his speech deficiency, he practiced regularly and for very long hours. He would travel great distances to be alone to practice, and went on to become the most powerful speaker of his time. In the case of Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte, their small physical structures stimulated them to seek military glory. Ludwig van Beethoven’s deafness largely accounted for his extraordinary intentness on the beauty of sound.

Fortunately, inferiority complex is not reserved only for the few. We all have it, in one way or the other. There was, in more recent times, a tiny boy who dreamed of being a football hero. A college football coach told him that he was more the type for a water boy. Nurturing a bruised ego from the rejection, it dawned upon the young man that what he really wanted was the applause and popularity attached to being a football star.

He then switched to public speaking, for which he had some talent. He later wrote a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People, a great all-time bestseller perhaps second only to the Bible. By shifting his goal from the impossible to the attainable, Dale Carnegie not only overcame his own inferiority complex but helped millions of others to overcome theirs. Carnegie’s feat has since been replicated by many others, in many different fields of human endeavor. Their successes though are not as sensational anymore, since these have now become quite common.

The blind has unusually keener hearing, touch and smell than normal. There obviously is some natural coping mechanism for organic deficiencies on a biological level to compensate for physical defects on a psychological level. But this, so far, mainly happens without need for human intention. Greater compensatory faculties can be created by the human will.

Louis Pasteur had the speech areas of his brain destroyed by a stroke. By a powerful effort of the will, he slowly and painfully fought his way back to speech, developing new speech centers in the brain. There’ve been famous strong men who were weaklings in their youth, record-breaking milers who had been cripples, prima ballerinas who had had polio, great signers who had been victims of tuberculosis. Struggling desperately to overcome their disability, they had developed a superior ability. This was not blind nature at work—this was human will.

It looks like there is some sort of a law, as though human beings often accomplish great deeds because of an initial disability. It’s as though humanity need a hurdle in order to jump—and that the higher the hurdle, the bigger the jump. Man alone of all the animals is capable of plotting his own destiny, notwithstanding personal inadequacies. And if Alfred Adler is right with his theory of inferiority complex as a human tool for success—man alone can turn his own deficiencies into effective instruments for personal victory.

Man alone can consciously attempt to compensate for his own lack. Of course, a person may go through life with a vague sense of inferiority without ever recognizing the cause. But if he tries, he can identify his weaknesses and devise ways to make it work for him, instead of defeat him.

In order to understand the labyrinth that is the self, we must try to take ourselves apart, carefully isolating aspects of our personality piece by piece, admit the most damning facts we’ll find and try to put the pieces back together again in a more comprehensible pattern. Admittedly, this is difficult to do. But it’s absolutely worth doing, if we really want to put ourselves in order.

Alfred Adler has put forth a simple prescription. Asking ourselves a simple question, “What do I want in life?” can start us on our quest for personal satisfaction. Every human being has a goal. Formulated in infancy, it is no more than a vague desire to dominate.

Generally, we all share similar goals—superiority, prestige, the esteem of our fellowmen. Our goals represent a compensation for some real or fancied personal deficiency. Our yearning for supremacy may yet be to ultimately dominate over our own selves.

But we must choose a goal within our reach, and not seek an unattainable one by daydreaming. In the world of daydreams, every girl is a ballerina, a beauty queen, a movie star; every boy is a sports hero, a brilliant lawyer, a powerful tycoon. And all these big goals will be achieved through the dreamers’ natural gifts, which they never doubt they possess, rather than by hard work, which they all hope to avoid.

Daydreamers choose goals which flatter their egos, without even considering their actual abilities for attaining them. These people are mostly incapable of attaining their goals, and make little effort at it, so their sense of defeat steadily deepens. They’ll do better by shifting goals. Not even the eagles are meant for the heavens; that’s why they choose to soar only up to the sky.

Goals that are set impossibly high will slowly lead from idealism to frustration to demoralization. It may feel bad to admit that one is never going to be a Nicole Kidman or a Tiger Woods. But with hard work, one can become equally good and successful and famous, in whatever other fields his or her skills fit better. In the end, it is far more satisfying than sticking to a dream that will never come true.

By trying to understand our own motivations and goals, we will know what we really want and why. It will become clear to us that we need to discard some desires and put something else in their places. Then, we will no longer be simply driven by blind impulses, but will drive them instead, to take us to our plotted destination of a richer, fuller life. (E-MAIL: modequillo@ hotmail.com)