Chapter 3 of "My Word"

I definitely agree with Sarah Blum on her descriptions of the authentic and performance self. People who are more authentic do things for themselves. People who are more performance self tend to do things to prove to people how good or smart they are. I agree with Blum that the inspiration of authentic self people come from themselves. I believe they try to make themselves better people. Performance self people are inspired by other people and want to become better than them . I found it interesting that performance self people would do a lot to get the result they want . People would go as far as plastic surgery or even changing the color of their hair, like Madonna. I think of authentic self people to be more humble about their achievements while performance self people would probably brag about their accomplishments more.

I consider myself both an authentic self and a performance self. In sports I am an authentic self because I play for my own fun,exercise, and health. If I win its great, but if I don't...well at least I got some exercise out of it and I stay healthier. In school I am a performance self because I need to impress my teachers and the result is the only thing that matters and gets me ahead of others. You can try as hard as you can but fail because of the result wasn't what the teachers were looking for. In the long run I am studying for myself to become something in life, but the path to become an authentic self involves a lot of performance.

People who are performance self are probably more prone to plagiarism because they are more likely to go to farther extremes to get ahead of others. According to Sarah Blum, authentic self people are characterized by solitude. There is no point for them to teach because they are only doing thing for themselves. They don't care about the result as much as performance self people do.