I heard of the idea before and again on Wed from Jocko. When he was a teenager,
he thought that a scary angry face was power. "You can lose your temper and
suddenly you seem to have some extra strength." he remembered thinking "If I can
get the rage thing going and people are afraid of me, that's a positive thing."
I would have wholeheartedly agreed when I was a kid. I grew up never being
taught explicitly that anger was weakness. If it was mentioned, the concept was
not fully or convincingly explained to me. Vexation could amount to a foible but
nothing serious. Instead, the classics I was addicted to, be it the Three Kingdoms
or Journey to the West, often told heroic deeds out of righteous wrath. The
dramatic performance from the master story-tellers on the radio planted the seed
quietly. Being able to rage like my heroes, especially against the injustice of
the world, meant manhood to a pre-teen boy. An obedient son at home and model
student at school, I sometimes admired the "bad" kids who made trouble.
At work, doing things against my will felt like having my identity taken away.
I raised my voice a few times, against people that I despised or things I
perceived as unfair. Often, my inability to express myself precisely in English
did not help. "A man curses because he doesn't have the words to say what's on
his mind." said Malcolm X. In the end, the effect was not entirely what I
wanted. I didn't get fired on the spot and, sure, I scared some away, but it
also made others see me as emotional and difficult to work with.
Many of my Indian colleagues, however, handled conflicts cheerfully. They might
not like what is imposed onto them, but they complied with no obvious grudges and
they seemed to have mastered the art of not taking things personally. It looked as
if they had a big picture in mind all the time.
At home, temper typically set in within one minute in a disagreement with my
wife. Insecure to begin with, I often cared about her opinions of me and quickly
became defensive and soon things went downhill and ended up as a shouting match.
So much pain over the years.
Nowadays I think anger as inability to see the solution with failure to control
emotion and losing temper as a cowardly way out of a predicament. The revelation
came to me late in life (when I stopped believing man beats heaven or 人定胜天) but
I must be thankful that it came after all. I could have lived this life without
conciously doing anything about my anger.
Losing temper is NOT sexy. "As soon as I made that connection," recalled Jocko
"I said to himself: this is weak and I'm not going to do it anymore." So won't I.
