Why is name-dropping so irresistible? For one, it gives you a sense of importance and makes you think it validates your relevance. Yet, its delivery and the reception are almost always opposite. It rarely makes you look good. It almost never has the effect one intends it to do. It doesn’t produce admiration, respect, or even jealousy or resentment.
If anything, name-dropping makes you look like a person with a lack of self-awareness, desperate for importance. It is the hallmark of the insufferable.
I always admire people who are paradoxically humble and down-to-earth. If they name-drop, it is entirely unintentional. In their indifference to things like these, they reveal a deeper alignment of two forms of awareness: of the self and of of other people.
And that takes real work. That is difficult to obtain. That is worthy of admiration.