North Carolina adopted Esse Quam Videri as their state motto in 1871. It is a Latin phrase translated as ‘to be, rather than to seem.’ The earliest iteration of a similar phrase was from the playwright Aeschylus making the idea almost as old as western society. Unfortunately, it is a very foreign idea in American culture where status is for sell for the top dollar. However, in a Morgan Housel article ‘Respect and Admiration,’ he argues that “there are cases when people’s desire to show off fancy stuff is because it’s their only, desperate, way to gain some sense of respect and admiration.’ Later he says, “Shouldn’t gaining respect and admiration through what you do instead of what you own be the goal?”
Almost on queue, Ryan Holiday inadvertently, I think, wrote an excellent few paragraphs about General Grant and the topic at hand:
After a long line of incompetence, after a long chain of excuses, after a series of failures, the Union cause finally turned around when General Ulysses S. Grant took command. Other generals had focused on pomp and circumstance, they had been anxious and defensive, they claimed they didn’t have the resources or troops they needed.
As the great historian Bruce Catton wrote in The Hallowed Ground, “when Grant showed up things began to happen.” It didn’t matter if he was in charge of a small army or a big one, he was a leader and when leaders arrive, they make a difference. A staff officer noted the same thing. “We began to see things move,” he noted of Grant’s rescue of a besieged army. “We felt that everything came from a plan. He came into the army quietly, no splendor, no airs, no staff. He used to go about alone. He began the campaign the moment he reached the field. Everything was done like music, everything was in harmony.”
This is a lesson that Marcus Aurelius learned from the Emperor Hadrian, who spent nearly the entirety of his reign touring the empire. He would show up in a city that had languished as a backwater and start a series of public improvements. He would come upon troops who had grown fat and lazy and put them to work building fortifications (many of which still stand). He made reforms. He replaced ineffective bureaucracy. He restored temples. He solved problems.
A leader isn’t a figurehead. They are a doer. They are a solver of problems. They are in command of themselves, confident in themselves, and this feeling is contagious. They make things happen, they help the people around them make things happen. This is not random or a result of their authority, it’s because of their skill–they are playing their instrument, making music, creating harmony and progress.
Ryan Holiday in the Daily Stoic
If we shape ourselves into doers by studying the great leaders of history, then we can gain the skill-sets and ethics required to be a great leader. What would be worse than rising to a level beyond your competence and failing?
I would rather fail in the lower and middle ranks and learn the proper way to handle a problem than when the circumstances are more dire in the upper ranks.
Esse Quam Videri.
To be a great leader, then you must be patient with yourself and work towards greatness everyday.
To be great with money you need to have the knowledge, but more importantly the right behaviors.
To be great with money, then you need to be getting several things right; frugality is the most important, but hard work, intelligence, and some stoicism to contain your ego and expectations.
To seem; this can be bought with debt and impatience, and is paper thin.
Millionaire Librarian 
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