Summary
Joe explains the core philosophy of Art of Accomplishment in a concise manifesto. He identifies two major problems: people are constantly stressed and not enjoying themselves. The real causes aren’t external (too much to do, phones, money) but internal: brutal self-talk, suppressed emotions creating physical tension, and lack of genuine connection.
AOA’s approach differs from conventional wisdom in three ways. First, self-understanding replaces self-improvement — understanding yourself like you’d understand a computer works better than attacking yourself for not being better. Second, emotional fluidity replaces emotional management — instead of managing or being overwhelmed by emotions, you learn to feel them fully without hurting anyone, discovering that resistance to emotion causes pain, not the emotion itself. Third, connection starts within — your capacity to love, be honest with, and connect with others directly mirrors your capacity to do the same with yourself.
Key Concepts
- Self-understanding over self-improvement
- Brutal self-talk, suppressed emotions, and disconnection are the three roots of chronic stress
- Feeling threatened makes the world treat you as a threat
- It’s the resistance to emotion that hurts, not the emotion itself
Key Quotes
“If you had a boss who was sitting next to you saying, ‘You should have done that better. Why didn’t you do this? You’re messing up’ — you’d be stressed. Especially if it was talking at you 10, 20 times a minute, which is what the voice in your head is actually doing.”
“We move away from self-improvement and we move towards self-understanding.”
“Every time we cry, we feel better. Every time we actually get angry without doing it at somebody, we feel more alive.”
“My capacity to love myself is very highly correlated with my capacity to love you.”
Transcript
So I get asked the question a lot, what is AOA all about? And so this is my answer to that question. So what I notice is that people, especially in America, especially in the Western world, have two major problems. One is they’re constantly stressed out. And two, that they’re not enjoying themselves. And this has a massive impact. The first impact is in your personal life. If you are stressed out all the time and you’re not enjoying yourself, what that means is you’re not learning as quickly. It means that you are uh going to die sooner. It means that you don’t have as many friends. There’s all sorts of evidence that tells you what stress and lack of enjoyment is going to do in your life that aren’t good. But there’s a bigger problem than that. The problem is that if I’m under stress, I feel like there’s a threat. And the problem with treating the world as a threat is that eventually the world reacts like it’s a threat. And you can see this everywhere. You can see this in the political parties. You can see this between countries. You can see this in families. You can see this with teenagers and their and their parents. They’re constantly feeling like they’re under threat and then they’re treating people like a threat and then people act like they are actually a threat. And then there’s this huge fight that’s going on on every level of our society. So what people think is that we’re stressed and we’re not enjoying ourselves because we have too much to do. the world is too fast. We’re overwhelmed with a to-do list or our phones or we have to work harder to make enough money to pay off the car payment. And this is why we think that stress is happening. It’s all this external stuff, but that’s actually not the real reason for stress. That amplifies it, but it’s not actually the real reason. The real reason that we are stressed is really three things. One is that we’re talking to ourselves in a horrible way. We’re constantly beating ourselves up. And if you’re constantly under attack, you feel stressed. If there’s if you had a boss who was sitting next to you and saying, “You should have done that better. Why didn’t you do this? You’re messing up. Why haven’t you gotten further along since you’re 40 years old?” You’d be stressed, especially if it was talking at you 10, 20 times a minute, which is the what the voice in your head is actually doing. So, that’s a huge cause of stress. The second one is not actually feeling our emotions. If you stop feeling emotions right now, take this moment and try to stop feeling all of your emotions and you’ll notice just like I’m doing right now. You have to constrict your muscles to do it. And that literally is what it’s like to be physically under stress, to tighten your muscles. That’s the second reason that we’re mostly under stress. And the third is that we don’t have that connection anymore. The longest study that Harvard ever did was all about how when we have a great sense of community, everything is better. We live longer. We’re happier. Our lives are more successful. But we don’t have that sense of community anymore. We don’t even have that sense of connection with ourselves. And if you do have that sense of connection with yourself, you’re far less stressed. At Art of Accomplishment, what we’re doing is we’re going to the root, which is the way that we talk about ourselves, the way that we relate to emotions, and the amount of connection that we have. Now, the way we think about those three things is very different than most people. So, most people think about the relationship we have with ourselves as we have to improve. I have to do some self-improvement. The problem with self-improvement is that’s just more abuse. That’s just more attack. Why aren’t you skinnier? Why aren’t you happier? Why aren’t you more realized? Why aren’t you more awakened? It’s just another form of a of attack. Whereas, if you just realize understand who you are, the same way you would understand how to use a computer, things start working. It doesn’t work as well if you’re like, “God damn it, I can’t use a computer. Why can’t I use a computer? I got to get better at the computer.” as it does to understand how a computer works. and then you don’t have to worry about getting better. You understand it. It’s the same thing. If you understand yourself, things work a lot better. So, we move away from self-improvement and we move towards self-standing. The second thing that we do is in emotions, we go for what we call emotional clarity. You can also call it emotional fluidity. So, typically because our brains are scared of emotions, we have these two thought processes. either I have to manage my emotions or I’m going to be taken away by my emotions. I’m going to lose myself in our my emotions. But there’s actually this other opportunity which is to feel your feelings to express your feelings in a way that doesn’t hurt anybody in a way that doesn’t take you away. And so think about it like this. People typically are like, “Okay, I can’t get angry because if I get angry, I’m going to hurt somebody.” And so their mind is, “Oh, either don’t get angry or you’re getting angry at screaming at somebody.” But there’s another option. You can just get angry and not hurt anybody. You can just feel your anger. You can just actually invite whatever emotional experience you’re having and learn how to accept and love it. And when that happens, what occurs is that the emotions that you have, you stop resisting. And it’s the resistance of those emotion that hurts. It’s not the emotion itself. We think it is. We think it’s like, oh, sadness hurts. But every time we cry, we feel better. Notice or we say, “Oh, the anger is going to destroy everything.” But if we actually get angry, but without doing it at somebody and we just like move that anger, we feel more alive. We feel more vibrant. And so we’re talking about a path that allows for those emotions, but we do it in such a way that it doesn’t carry you away and have you lost or indulge that emotion. And then as far as connection, the way we look at that differently is a lot of people are like, “Oh, connection is about the other person.” But the connection isn’t about the other person. It’s about yourself. My capacity to love myself is very highly correlated with my capacity to love you. My capacity to be honest with myself is very highly correlated with my capacity to be honest with you. My ability to connect with myself is very much reflected in my ability to connect with you. And so we look at that connection not just as oh how do you connect with somebody else it’s how do you connect with yourself and what we learn is that when you’re connecting with other people and we do so much of our work not as a film like this or not as a lecture what I’m doing right now a lot of our courses are all about doing this work with other people connecting with other people learning to connect more deeply with others by learning to connect more deeply with ourselves So that’s how we do it and then everything else falls out of that. Meaning let’s say you want to stop procrastinating. How do you stop procrastinating? Well, you feel the emotions that you don’t want to feel that prevent you from doing the thing. I don’t want to do the thing right now because I might have to feel something. So you feel it. You also stop procrastinating by being connection with other people. Let’s do the work together. That’s an easy way to stop procrastinating. Another way that you stop procrastinating is you realize what’s making you procrastinate rather than telling yourself to stop procrastinating. You actually understand it. And and this goes on for every single thing that we’re doing. How do you have better relationships? You understand what’s stopping you in the relationship. You learn how to connect. You feel your feelings. So, it’s it’s really formulaic when you really break it down. It’s really easy. We’re constantly going back to these three ways of looking at yourself. And they’re counterintuitive. They’re slightly different, but they will get you great results every time. So, that’s what we’re doing. That’s every that’s that’s why we’re here. And and you could say that we’re here for a lot of reasons. That was a great story that I just told you as to why we’re here. Another story is that we’re teaching people how to love themselves. Another story that we could tell is that uh we want you to really understand how amazing you are. A personal favorite story of mine is, you know, the what I’m here for is to make sure your children and your children’s children are raised in such a way that they love themselves. I could tell you a ton of stories about it, but ultimately why we’re here is because when you’re passionate about something, you got to do it or you’re just not happy. And we’re passionate about helping ourselves and helping other people realize the truth of who they are.