What does a baby have to do to be valuable? What does a three-year-old have to do to be valuable? There’s no answer. Yet Western culture conditions us to believe we must earn value through production — enough chores, good enough grades, college, career achievement — and only then will we receive love.
This conditioning creates enormous organizational dysfunction. Joe describes going into companies and finding that each level was trying to appear valuable to the next, but nobody actually knew what the level above wanted. People asked questions in meetings not because they cared about the answer, but because they wanted to be seen as valuable. None of this gets the job done.
“If you’re doing things for people to get them to love you, they’re not loving you anyways. It’s transaction. It’s like saying giving somebody $100 to love you. It’s not love.”
The thought experiment is simple: take all the love you feel for what you love most in the world, then turn it toward yourself. What did you need to do to deserve that? The stress melts away in the recognition that value is inherent, not earned. It’s not a doing that makes you valuable — it’s an undoing.
Related Concepts
- You can’t earn being
- Should creates stress, not change
- Love conditioning is somatic
- Authority distorts reality for leaders