A good case of a researcher knowing nothing about the subject he is researching:
There’s a good reason why so many successful people are narcissists.
According to a new study, people with an inflated sense of self-worth get ahead in life because they are mentally tough.
Their grandiosity, entitlement, dominance and superiority gives them motivation and confidence to take on life’s challenges.
And this lead on other people begins in school, according to the research.
Scientists have found that adolescents with the personality trait often got btter grades at school, compared to their more humble counterparts.
My guess would be this researcher took the test and scored sky high in narcissism, and this was his coping mechanism.
The truth is, narcissists are not fearless, or tough, or resilient. In fact they are terrified, as well as enraged at anyone who exacerbates their terror, unless they can focus themselves on someone else who is miserable.
But some do often succeed in high-risk/high-gain endeavors.
One thing which struck me about narcissists is a fundamental disconnect they exhibit from the rest of their fellow humans. Regular humans are somewhat of a mystery to them. They usually know on some level they are different, and that others finding out they are different is a bad thing for them. It is probably conditioned in youth, where they learn through experience that when they give free reign to their inner ID that others will turn on them. So to cope, they mimic.
My own narcissist was constantly on the lookout for people who he would model himself after. If everyone lauded architect Frank Lloyd Wright, he would recite facts about Wright as if he were an expert. And he concurred the ideas were brilliant, no matter how stupid they were (Garages were a vestige of stables for horses, and since cars could be left outside, Garages were thus wholly superfluous on the modern house.) He’d model his politics after McCain, because the media lauded him, his intellectual endeavors after whatever the NY Times Book review indicated was in vogue, and so on. He never thought for himself.
So I think Narcissists who succeed are a case of people who see a bad option in every direction, all of which terrify them equally, and as a result they dive into whatever direction other successful people have traveled, and they hope for the best. It isn’t courage so much as clueless desperation that really doesn’t know what to do. Many do succeed, but I will bet many more fail miserably, and end up back at square one.
But those who succeed probably follow a pathway that is not as available to those normal individuals for whom all of life is not a panicked flight from terrors in every direction.
Those contented normies do not fail where the narcissist succeeds, however. Rather they enjoy life in a way the narcissist never will, and so contented, never feel the need to enter a high-risk endeavor which probably will end in abject failure, but which just might allow them to emulate some secret idol they have.
Maybe he’s defining a narcissist based on some simplified cartoon stereotype of what most people would think one is like. It would be amusing if maybe the author was envious of a successful person who happened to be a bit pretentious and overbearing, so he wrongly labeled that person a narcissist.
The only person in my irl environment I know for sure is one -Narcissist Grandma- was fairly successful only because she became a money-obsessed workaholic who worked her way through all the time she could have spent making memories with her family doing normal people stuff.
What the writer seems to be describing is instead someone like Donald Trump. He has a rather large ego and is very mentally tough. He’s certainly gotten ahead in life. He’s grandiose, dominant, and confident. But he does not have a sense of entitlement, and that’s the key difference. The narcissist I know (who your book helped me to understand much better, by the way) will talk all day about how hard he’s working on something, or is going to work on something, but it’s only talk. His actual work ethic is nothing.
I recently downloaded and read your book on narcissists and found it very interesting. But my experience with a couple people I believe to be narcissists is a bit different. They do seem to succeed due to a superficial charm and the chameleon – like ability to do and say what is necessary to blend in, especially when someone who matters is in the vicinity (a boss, for example) In fact, I note that the reactions you describe them having in your book, are quite like my reactions TO them. I even began to wonder if I am the narcissist, except that these individuals I’m thinking of have taken off the mask enough times around me (I seem to bring it out of them) that I KNOW the extreme mismatch in behavior, actions, etc I see is not my imagination. Watching them charm their way out of consequences is the most helpless feeling, though eventually many of them have gone too far to avoid them entirely.
With regard to physiognomy, these individuals have a particular type of gaze, for lack of a better word. There’s an intensity in their eyes that I’ve come to recognize which I can only describe as “something else” looking through their eyes at me.
I also could be confusing sociopaths with narcissists, though I do think of them as nearly the same.
Yes, the eye thing is a definite sign. I take it as them calculating as they are looking at you. But it is like something behind the eyes.
If you deal with the younger ones, they can mask that panicky sensation you feel, so you don’t notice they have it far worse than you. And if they are effectively triggering you, it seems to relax them, and make them feel in control. If you encounter older ones who are losing the ability to mask, you will begin to see it break out here and there.
Grasping the panic that drives them, is key to making them manageable when you have to get involved with them. But it will always be miserable, even once you become a master at triggering them. If you are not one, you are designed to be in positive relationships that are not as hostile.