egoism with a brain

“The intelligent egoist is the one that thinks about others first”

I was puzzled as I heard this statement during a conference a few years ago and at first I could not understand what the guy was talking about, it sounded like a paradox.

“Because if you only think about yourself” he added “at your immediate and mere personal satisfaction, in the long run you actually end up damaging yourself. The intelligent egoist is the one that understands what he needs to give in order to get what he wants”.

I was at a sales conference and did not expect to hear anything too inspiring, yet this sentence impressed me more than what I´d imagine: this afternoon, some 8 years later, while washing my hands absorbed in my thoughts about trivial troubles of people around me, this puny little motto made it through the wilderness of my mind and made me think “Man, so very true”.

A shame that it there is no lack of egoists, but very few of them appear to be intelligent ones.