On not taking yourself seriously

The quietest discipline in business is forgetting your own importance for an hour.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-04-01 · Life

The strongest people I work with in Cambodia have one habit in common. They do not perform themselves.

Patrick walks the Moo Moo farm in the same shirt every week. Mr. Chan Ang sits at the BRM mill in Kampong Thom and does the count himself when he wants to be sure of it. Om Dhavy runs operations and I have never heard her raise her voice. None of them are quiet out of humility. They are quiet because they are busy.

I notice the opposite in myself whenever a meeting goes sideways. On the drive home the mind starts rehearsing what I should have said. It drafts the email I will send tomorrow, builds a small case for the defence, runs the whole thing again with better lines. None of that is work. The work was the meeting, and the meeting is over.

This is where the nondual lens earns its keep. There is no separate person in here who needs defending. There was a meeting, it went the way it went, and there is a next step. The story about how I performed gets added afterwards, on top, and it costs an hour I could have spent on the next step.

None of which is detachment. I still care, probably too much. I lose sleep over the rice harvest and the Atlanta sell-through and the next round of investor calls. What changed is that the caring is no longer resting on a fragile idea of who I am, which means it can go into the thing itself.

If you want a test for whether you are taking yourself too seriously, try this after a hard call. Ask what you would tell a friend in the same position. The answer arrives clean and fast, almost boringly obvious. Then ask what you are telling yourself. That one comes out tangled and takes twenty minutes. The gap between those two answers is the tax.

Most weeks I still pay it. Less than I used to.