This is why you're not who you could be

What's the biggest irrational fear that you have besides being unsuccessful? I guess not being enough. Imagine for a second a world in which you are unanimously adored by millions, but you hate yourself. Are you happy? Every man just wants to hear, I know you can be more, but you are enough already. Admit it, you aren't like them, you're not even close. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider. People who are so afraid of being broken by their feelings that they never let themselves be shaped by them. Not being good enough. And I don't know who for. I don't know who I am scared of not being good enough for or enough for. The sense that you always need to prove yourself, you always need to sort of offer the world something in order for it to love you back. And now imagine a world where you're disliked by everybody, but you love yourself. I propose that self-love you would be happier. You're going to be great, but you don't need to be great. And even if you just stay where you are, I'll be right here next to you. We are all chasing a sense of completion, but we never actually allow ourselves to savor any tastes of completion that we get along the way. Alan Watts has got this idea, if we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives, we may forget altogether to live them. The common feeling that your life has not yet begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future, this idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death. And this is the uncomfortable truth. As we get older, days move quickly because we can't remember them. And we don't remember our days because we haven't done anything memorable with them. Our days are forgettable, therefore we forget them. Monotony is the enemy of a well-remembered life. So, in order to slow time down, you have to give your brain a reason to pay attention. Leading a full life means having lots of varied experiences that will later be memorable. This means you need to start saying yes to more new things and no to more of the same things. Saying yes will guarantee that you create some novel and potentially intense memories. Sure, it might be easier to stay on the couch instead of going out. But you know that you won't recall a single thing if you spend yet another night watching Netflix, whereas you will have tons of memories if you go and do something new. Allow yourself to be immersed in the things that you spend your time doing. Regularly plan new experiences, talk to different people, say yes to adventures whenever you can, walk the dog on a different route, visit a new town, eat at a fresh cafe. These are all memory investments that future you will be able to draw dividends from. Each day, you can ask yourself the question, what did I do today that will stand out in my memory? And the more that you can answer this question clearly, the slower your time will move. Eventually, you are going to be looking back on your life. The choice is between viewing a beautiful, varied art gallery stretching as far as the eye can see, or a grey, monotonous hallway peppered with the ghosts of TikTok dances and Netflix series. If you make your life memorable, you will remember it. You're doing this for you. This is something I've only realized relatively recently, but after a certain level of material comfort, the only person that you need to do this thing for is you. Your conscience knows when you're being honest and when you're not. I think optimizing to make that person happy, that conscience happy, is a really good idea. You should basically be the person that your mom thinks you are, or the person that your younger self wanted as a role model. Brave, courageous, earnest, honest, virtuous, like on fire. There's this quote from the ancient Greeks that says, live as though all your ancestors were living again through you. We judge people based on how much life they can tolerate, how much feeling they can deal with and carry and enjoy, and that's something that we should all try and have more of in ourselves, being that person that your younger self wanted as a role model. Fear doesn't keep you safe, it keeps you trapped. Whatever you fear establishes the boundaries of your freedom. So if you're afraid of heights, you stay low. If you're afraid of people, you stay alone. And such a good asymmetry, you can think thoughts at 4,000 words a minute and you tend to only get paralyzed by overthinking negative outcomes. You're not, I wish in these 4,000 words a minute, they're just all about great things that might happen in my life. Like that's not, that's not the way that it works. Affection is impossible. Roger Federer played 1,526 singles matches across his career. He won nearly 80% of them, but he won only 54% of all the points he played. 80% of matches won, and he only won 54% of every point he played, which means that even one of the greatest to ever do it lost nearly every other point. I think the lesson here is to treat every iteration like it matters and then let it go. Whether it's an unforced error or a perfect winner, it's still just one point. One failed relationship, one embarrassing interaction, one late wake up time. It's still just one point. What matters most is how quickly you reset and where you finish in the end, not how you perform just now. And this is one of the best questions I think to ask yourself when faced with a decision, which is what would you tomorrow want you today to do? And the reason it's so effective, I think, is it depersonalizes the decision, helps you treat yourself like a friend you're responsible for helping. It forces you to optimize for long-term thinking instead of immediate gratification. And it reminds you that ultimately decisions are not being made for you now. They're being made for you in 24 hours and 24 days and 24 months. Our decisions are investments that we make into our future. Optimizing to gratify your desires in the moment at the expense of the way that you will feel and the story you will tell yourself about yourself in the future is rarely a good deal because you live with the story of your decisions for far longer than the impact of them. You need to be very, very careful about what you invest into that future story of you. An ode to people who don't believe in themselves. What comes first belief or action? Do you need to believe that you can do a thing before you can do it? Fake it until you make it is one option, but incredibly hard if you're introspective and have low self-belief and high standards. So what about make it until you believe it? Here are some lessons that I've learned. You can believe you're not worthy of a thing and still attain it. You can be adamant that your efforts are going to go badly and still succeed. You can grip and grasp and fear and ruin the enjoyment and be totally unwarranted and things still go well. You can have no self-belief and show up anyway. You can want more for yourself without knowing exactly what that looks like. You can doubt the process, question your talent, be uncertain that you're making progress, disparage your accomplishments, permanently feel like you're not working hard enough no matter how hard you work, never give yourself a break, fail to fully feel gratitude, be terrified of never reaching your goals, and still end up in a place that your 20-year-old self could not imagine you'd ever get to. Self-belief is overrated. Generate evidence, says Ryan Holiday. Railing against how hard something is or how much time it's taking up or the difficulty, the fact that people around you don't believe you or that no one's giving you the support that you want or that you thought it wouldn't take this long, the fact that that is happening is half of the course. It is the price of doing business. It's a cost of entry for whatever the thing is that you're going about because if it wasn't, it wouldn't be happening. And so much of the pain, as far as I can see, is you railing against the fact that there are difficulties, there are going to be problems continuously for the rest of time, and there will never be a day when you don't wake up and have to mediate or negotiate or cajole your way through something. Such things aren't meant to be easy, is a nice little reminder. Don't be so worried about winning that you forget what winning is supposed to feel like. Is your presiding feeling when things go well one of happiness and satisfaction or one of relief? Is it joy or simply the abatement of fear? After a while of winning, you realize that how you win is more important than if you win. How you feel during the event is more important than the outcome of the event. How the people who read your work are impacted is more important than how many people are impacted. You can't be so terrified of failing that even the act of winning is made miserable. Some advice on how to support men. Men want to aim high without feeling insufficient if they fall short. Men want their suffering to be recognized and appreciated without being pandered to or patronized and made to feel weak. Men want to believe they can be more without feeling like they're not already enough. Men want to be able to open up without being judged. Men want support without feeling broken. Men want to be loved for who they are, not for what they do. A question that every guy has asked themselves is how do I set lofty goals which drive me to fulfill my potential without feeling less than if I don't get there tomorrow? And the desire for self-love and high performance comes into conflict inside the mind of everyone. I think most men desire a mix of encouraged self-belief and understanding support. Inevitably these two things come into conflict. Basically every man just wants to hear I know you can be more but you are enough already and even if you just stay where you are I'll be right here next to you. You're going to be great but you don't need to be great and I'm with you no matter what. If you as a person that's close to a man in his life can say those two sentences to him I wonder how few men have ever heard that. I know you can be more but you are enough already and even if you just stay where you are I'll be right here next to you. If you find a girl who believes in your dreams more than you do, who makes you want to be a better man, who's willing to work alongside you to get there and is grateful for whatever you have just marry her. Your relationship should feel like home. It should feel like a house with a sturdy roof and strong foundations and ---- gets thrown at it all the time and rain comes down and there's weather and there's heat and there's cold but inside of that house is the one safe refuge that you have. You can lose your job, status, your financial position can fall away, your health can break down, your friends can leave you but you have this one safe place and it's in another person it's in them and if you can't be yourself with that person the entire house does not exist. Rene Brown has got this line, without vulnerability there is no courage. If there's no uncertainty, no risk, no exposure, you're not being that brave because there's nothing on the line. We are so quick to praise suppression as strength. We call it control, we call it discipline, we pretend emotional detachment is a sign of maturity but fully living your life means actually feeling what ******* happens, not just performing composure while something inside of you quietly breaks. Different symptoms from the same disease, people who are so afraid of being broken by their feelings that they never let themselves be shaped by them. The real fear isn't just the emotion itself, it's also what the emotion might not receive. We're not afraid of sadness, we're afraid of being sad in front of someone who shrugs. We're not afraid of grief, we're afraid of grieving and being judged for doing so. That's the abandonment we're trying to avoid. Even if we know that feeling our feelings is braver than denying them, the people around us still might think less of us for opening up. So we keep things hidden, not because we want to but because we don't want to feel alone in the sharing. Men as far as I can see have this harder still as almost all definitions of masculinity have some version of emotional control as a core tenet which makes feeling pride in showing emotions as a man even tougher. But you cannot connect with the world or anyone in it if you never truly show yourself. Intimacy only exists to the degree that you reveal yourself, your sadness, anger, joy, desire, its boundaries. When you hide your flaws or your feelings out of fear of shame you block intimacy and authenticity. The more that you expose the closer you are, the less you show the more distant you become. Which do you want to choose? Vulnerability isn't weakness, it's rebellion. It's not how little you feel that makes you strong, it's how much you can face and stay open. The world belongs to optimists because if you're going to do anything big you have to believe that it can happen otherwise it never will. Sean Puri says the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich. 99% right and 100% wrong. They're right 99% of the time but they're wrong 100% because the only thing that matters is the big one at the end. Your family and friends will say that every girl you ever date is not good enough except for the one time you find the girl that you're actually going to marry or that this business idea won't work and you might have nine failures. My first nine businesses didn't really amount to anything. Nine as in the first one, I spent time on it, it failed. Second one, this one will be different, spent time on it, failed. And then the third one, this one, failed. And then six more after that and it's painful as ---- because the whole time everyone is telling you I told you so and they're right today but not forever. Problems are a feature of life not a bug. There will never come a time when you have no problems. What? Did you think that you would just wake up one day and you're going to cease having problems like completing a video game and leveling up to a map where there's nothing there? Would you pay the price back then for the insights and developments that you have now? If so, have faith that whatever stresses that you're facing right now will lead to a greater version of you in the future. The challenge that you're facing is a gift and leaning into the discomfort as if you invited it through the door saying thank you for the opportunity to learn and reflect because it's making you better. Whatever negativity is consuming your thoughts probably won't matter in three months time. So you are sacrificing your joy and presence in the moment for a problem which you won't even be able to recall in the future. So immortality is literally the only life where such flippancy with the days that you're alive for is acceptable. Stop taking things so seriously. No one is getting out of this game alive literally. In three generations no one will even remember your name and if that doesn't give you liberation to just drop your ******* problems and find some joy, I don't know what will. Life is inherently ridiculous and guaranteed to end sooner or later. So you might as well enjoy the ride.