Who Do You Think You Are?
The European War on Ambition
There’s a quiet European war on ambition going on. And it has been for going on for a very long time. In Scandinavia, there’s even a name for it.
The Law of Jante.
Growing up in Denmark, I’ve felt this law first hand. Tell someone you grew up with that things are going well for you, and you’ll quickly notice the temperature in the room drop a couple of degrees.
Nothing you can really point to. It’s an in-between the lines kind of thing. They nod, smile, and say “that’s great!”, and they mean it (most of the time, I think). But something always passes across the face first, a flicker before the smile catches up, and you feel it land somewhere deep in your chest.
So you do the thing you’ve always done. You shrink it.
“It’s nothing, really, just got a bit lucky you know?”
And you willingly hand them a smaller version of your life so the temperature comes back up, and everyone relaxes, and you go home having apologized for wanting more without ever using the word.
I did that for most of my life. And I know so many not only Scandinavians, but Europeans who did the exact same thing. I know many Americans may struggle to understand this concept, but in Europe, you do not rise above the group.
And in Denmark specifically, they even wrote a book about it.
The law you obey without ever reading it
In 1933 a writer named Aksel Sandemose published a novel called “A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks”. It was the story about a small Danish town he called Jante. He’d grown up in a place like it, and he hated what it did to people.
Buried in the book is a set of ten rules, the unspoken commandments the town lived by. He called them the Law of Jante.
They go something like this.
You’re not to think you are anything special.
You’re not to think you are as good as us.
You’re not to think you are smarter than us.
You’re not to think you know more than us.
You’re not to think you are good at anything.
You’re not to laugh at us.
You’re not to think you can teach us anything.
Sandemose wrote them as an indictment. Then something strange happened. Scandinavia read the list, recognized itself, and decided to keep it. His readers turned an accusation into a mirror, and a surprisingly comfortable one. Ask a Dane, a Norwegian, a Swede about Janteloven today and most of them will know exactly what you mean, and a fair number will half-defend it, because underneath it still feels like decency.
Don’t show off. Don’t think you’re better. Who do you think you are.
A law you obey perfectly without ever having read it is the most powerful kind there is. Nobody has to enforce it because everybody already has. It doesn’t live in a courthouse. It lives in the flicker across your friend’s face.
The rule nobody admits to
There are ten written rules. There’s an eleventh that doesn’t make the official list, and it’s the one that gives the whole thing away.
Roughly translated, it says: you don’t think we know a few things about you?
Read the first ten again with that one sitting underneath them. They stop sounding like humility. Humility doesn’t keep a file on you. The eleventh rule is surveillance wearing the costume of modesty, the quiet reminder that the group is watching, that it remembers, that the moment you climb too high someone will produce the receipt of who you used to be.
The first ten ask you to stay small.
And the eleventh explains what happens if you don’t.
That’s the part the polite version leaves out. Underneath the talk of equality and not showing off, there’s a hand resting on your collar. Stay where we can see you. Stay where we can reach you. Rise quietly or don’t rise at all.
It was never just a Danish thing
Here’s what took me longest to understand. The law belongs to all of Europe. Us Danes just had the bad luck of getting it written down.
Walk into the Netherlands and you’ll hear the same instinct in a single sentence parents say to their kids: just act normal, that’s already crazy enough. The Dutch even have a word for the landscape version of it, the image of a field after it’s been mowed, every stalk that grew above the rest cut back down to the height of the others.
The English-speaking world calls it tall poppy syndrome and chops the flower that stands up. The Irish have their own word, begrudgery, the particular pleasure of resenting the neighbor who did well. Germany files it under social envy. Across Poland and a lot of the East there’s the picture of crabs in a bucket, no lid required, because the moment one starts to climb out the others reach up and pull it back down.
I live in Spain now, and the Spanish have their version too, envidia, which they’ll sometimes call, half-laughing, the national sin. Different word, same flinch. Same drop in temperature when you tell the wrong person things are going well.
So if you’ve felt it, the guilt that shows up uninvited the moment you want something bigger than the people around you, here is what you’re actually feeling. The oldest piece of social technology there is, running quietly in the background, doing exactly what it was built to do. Half of Europe handed it to its children under a different name in every country. The voice belongs to all of them.
You inherited it and spent your life mistaking it for your own.
What the law is supposed to protect
I want to be fair to it, because the law isn’t stupid and the people who taught it to me weren’t cruel people either.
For most of human history, the person who rose was a genuine danger to everyone who stayed. In a village where you survive on each other, where the harvest is shared and the winter is long, someone deciding they’re better than the group and pulling away is more than ambitious.
They’re a crack in the thing keeping everyone alive.
The law was insurance. It kept people level because level was safer than tall. And it built things that are genuinely good. The Nordic countries it shaped have some of the highest trust and the lowest inequality on earth, places where the cleaner and the executive talk to each other as equals because the culture decided, early and on purpose, that no one is to act like more than anyone else.
My mother raised me on a version of that, mostly without ever saying it out loud. Be decent. Don’t put yourself above people. And there’s something in it I never want to lose.
The law is a parent who learned to keep you safe in a world that no longer exists, and never got the memo that the world moved on.
You can’t outrun it by moving away
I left Denmark at eighteen. I told myself a story about opportunity, but underneath it I think I was trying to get out from under the law, to go somewhere the flicker couldn’t follow me. I landed on a telemarketing floor in Spain with almost nothing, and I found out the thing nobody warns you about.
You still take it with you everywhere you go.
The law lives in your head, so it boards the plane, clears customs, and is standing there waiting when you land. I’d crossed a continent and I still flinched before letting myself want things out loud, still translated my wins into something smaller before handing them over, still felt the group watching from two thousand kilometers away. I’d moved to a country with its own version of the exact thing I was running from.
These days I build in public for a living.
I run experiments and post public essays where everyone can see them, I put my work and my numbers on the internet and I sell people the systems I figured out.
Sit with that against clause one and clause ten for a second.
You’re not to think you’re anyone. You’re not to think you can teach us anything. I do both of those, on purpose, every single day, for money.
For a kid raised under Jante there is almost nothing more transgressive. The first few times I posted something that said look at this, look what I made, here’s how I did it, I could feel the law screaming at me with all its might.
The escape happened the first time I felt that flinch, stopped, and recognized the voice doing the flinching as not actually mine.
Whose voice is it really?
The people who escape this societal mindset are those who worked out, at some point, that the voice telling them to stay small was borrowed, installed by people who were protecting them with the only tool they had, and that a borrowed ceiling is the easiest kind to walk through once you can see that it’s borrowed.
The law hands you a height and calls it yours. It was never yours. It belonged to the group, to the village, to a kind of survival that has mostly stopped existing.
And the timing has flipped completely today.
The world now runs on the visible and the specific. It rewards the person who stands up, names what they can do, and lets people watch them do it. Every instinct the law installed, stay level, stay quiet, never be seen wanting, is now the exact set of instincts that keeps a person stuck at zero.
The reflex that once protected the group is the one thing standing between you and most of what you say you want.
The discomfort doesn’t fully disappear for me, by the way. I still feel a knot in my stomach to this day, when I think about posting speaking head reels, wondering “who the f*ck am I to lecture someone on video?”. I also still feel the temperature drop when I tell certain people things are going well at home.
The difference is that I let the room stay cold for a second now. I’ve stopped reaching for the smaller version of my life to warm it back up, and I’ve stopped waiting for a permission slip that was always going to be withheld.
You don’t have to hate the people who taught you the law. Most of them love you, and they were handing you the same protection that was handed to them. Neither do you have to carry resentment towards your European heritage. I know many people who do that.
You only have to learn to tell their voice apart from your own. Once you can hear the difference, you get to choose which one you obey.
“You’re not to think you’re anyone”, the law says.
But I think you might be. Quietly, without asking anyone for permission, I deep down think you just might be.
Do with that what you want.
I hope you do great things.
- Pascal
Things I work on outside this, in case any of them are useful:
@iampascio on Twitter, my profile where I post my experiments and numbers
@xgrowthpascal on Twitter, where I’m going from 0 to 10k followers in 3 months
@creatorpascal on Twitter, my personal brand where I share essays just like this one (currently doing 30 essays in 30 days. This is day 21).