Achievement in a respectable activity can be a wonderful personal milestone bathed in positive emotions, where in the modern world individualism and individuation are widely valued. It may also be wonderful for other people in the achiever's family, social network, community, or society when they are favorably affected. But in this book, when refracted through three additional analytic lenses – individualism and individuality, big- vs small-picture thinking, and tolerance and compromise – the expression of achievement-based self-esteem takes on some startling new dimensions.
One of them is that, at the hubris/conceit end of the continuum of the expression of self-esteem, discussion risks becoming uncivil, owing to the disagreeable ways that achievement is sometimes conveyed (e.g., boasting, name calling, depreciating others' related achievements). Moreover, such can turn out to be enormously unproductive. Or as Leo Tolstoy once put it: "Conceit is incompatible with understanding."