Summary
Joe offers a radical reframe: self-improvement and self-sabotage are both forms of self-annihilation—attempts to escape the ego. He explores why love brings up grief, how to navigate identity shifts, why anxiety accompanies relaxation, and the difference between improving yourself and discovering yourself.
The core insight comes from watching a documentary about Golden Gate Bridge suicides: the desire to “end” oneself is the same impulse that drives monks toward ego dissolution and self-improvement junkies toward becoming a “better” version of themselves. All are attempts to escape the constant self-talk that defines us as small.
Key Concepts
- Self-improvement is a form of self-annihilation
- When love shows up, unloved parts surface to be loved
- Be in the unknown during identity shifts
- Discovery, not improvement
Key Quotes
“Self-improvement is a form of self-annihilation as much as self-sabotage is. In either case, we’re trying to escape the ego.”
“When you start loving and feeling gratitude, all the things that you don’t feel grateful for, that you don’t love come to the surface to get loved.”
“If you try to shove it into a box as soon as possible, what you’re doing is you’re using the old mental model to shove it into the box.”
“What’s the perfect oak tree? Is it the acorn, or is it the sapling? Or is it the 20-year-old oak tree or the 100-year-old oak tree? Which one’s perfect?”
“I recommend a discovery process where you’re not trying to make yourself into anything, but you’re just allowing yourself to find out who you are.”
“Find out what’s looking out behind your eyes and the self-sabotage will end.”
Transcript
When you start loving and feeling gratitude, all the things that you don’t feel grateful for, that you don’t love come to the surface to get loved. It’s like if you were feeding fish, all of a sudden you feed one or two of them and all the fish show up at the pond surface to get fed. It’s the same way.
So it’s a natural thing to happen that when love starts to show up, all the unloved parts of yourself come. And so often times you’re loving yourself and then anger or grief shows up and you think what the heck happened. Well, what happened is that part of you wants to be loved too.
And if you start loving it, everything changes. Instead of saying, “Oh, the grief is bad. I got to get rid of the grief. Why is there so much grief?” None of that is loving the grief. But if you start to love the grief, and you don’t resist it, everything will change. And you’ll start noticing that there’s even love in grief.
The second thing that’s happening is often times it’s very hard for people to stay in a place of love or gratitude because they’re not used to it and they’re scared of what’s going to come next. We seem to have this thing that happens in us where it’s like, “Oh, I am having so many good things happen. I have to be afraid because it’s going to go away.”
Well, of course it’s going to go away. All the bad things went away, too. But because we’re scared of that, we cut it off ourselves.
The problem in making decisions is that you are trying to avoid an outcome but the outcome that you’re trying to avoid is an emotional outcome. You’re saying “I don’t want to feel like a failure. I don’t want to feel bad or stupid.” And so you’re trying to make a decision to prevent yourself from feeling that way.
But if you love to feel that way, if you have no problem feeling stupid or like you’ve lost something, then all of a sudden decision-making becomes a lot easier.
And so then the next question is, why would anybody want to feel dumb? Well, it’s because it’s exactly in those moments that you can see the patterns that you’ve been living in that you can undo. I love feeling emotionally abandoned because I know that in those moments I’m in my trauma and that there’s something for me to heal and there’s some way for me to grow.
How to navigate the liminal space? The best thing to do is really not navigate it at all. Just be present with what’s going on, feel everything that’s coming up to the surface, and not try to reconstruct your life.
What’s happened if you’ve had an identity shift is that all of a sudden you don’t know exactly what you’re going to do or who you’re going to be because your identity is different. But if you try to shove it into a box as soon as possible, what you’re doing is you’re using the old mental model to shove it into the box.
Instead of that, just be in the unknown for as long as you possibly can be. And watch what unravels naturally. All of a sudden you’ll be in the supermarket. You’ll know what to order, know what to eat, know who to be with. But if you try to make it happen too quickly, you have to do the work often again and again until you can just allow yourself to be in the unknown.
It’s completely natural for you to be anxious with the relaxation. Typically what happens is that whenever there’s any kind of change happening, we start to get anxious. So yeah, it feels weird to start relaxing when you felt like you had to earn all the love that you needed or wanted.
If you think about what happiness is, what joy is, one way to define it is that it is what’s going on right now minus the expectations. And so if you don’t have the expectation that you have to do something to earn it, all of a sudden it’s just there and available to you.
Think about it like an oak tree. What’s the perfect oak tree? Is it the acorn, or is it the sapling? Or is it the 20-year-old oak tree or the 100-year-old oak tree? Which one’s perfect? Which one’s good enough? Which one has flaws?
The reality is we’re always evolving and we don’t have to think of it as we have to improve ourselves. Just because you’re learning something doesn’t mean you have to improve yourself. Doesn’t mean that you aren’t good enough as you are.
I recommend a discovery process where you’re not trying to make yourself into anything, but you’re just allowing yourself to find out who you are. In each stage of development, what occurs is that you don’t quite know anything and you have to feel your way around it.
I was watching this movie once called The Bridge—basically filming the Golden Gate Bridge for an extended period of time and just catching people jumping off of it. One of the stories was this guy who wrote in chalk on the cement, “End me.”
And I thought to myself, that’s exactly the same thing that monks want. All the monks that I ever knew meditating, they were also trying to create cessation in themselves.
And so what I’ve discovered at that moment was that self-improvement is a form of self-annihilation as much as self-sabotage is. In either case, we’re trying to escape the ego—trying to escape that constant incessant self-talk that’s telling us what to do or telling us we’re not good enough or defining us as something small instead of the expansive thing that we are.
That’s why it’s compelling. It’s because it’s part of the evolutionary necessity of life is to find ourselves again and again, redefine ourselves again and again until we find out what we truly are.
So if you really want to stop the self-sabotage, find out what you really are, find out what’s actually there beyond all of the sabotage, beyond all of the self-improvement, the thing that’s always been there. Find out what’s looking out behind your eyes and the self-sabotage will end.