How your Self-Image is holding you back from Success?
Self-image is holding you back from success.
When you're a kid you spent time building those little towers using lego blocks. You enjoyed building them. What you enjoyed ten times more than building was knocking them down. There is definitely a greater joy in destroying something than creating it. The key there is not having something destroyed while you are trying to make it better but consciously by your choice destroying it. Now that same building that you had made and your brother came and knocked it down. That's absolutely not okay because it wasn't your choice.
The biggest imprisonment with success and creation is ownership. Ownership is a huge problem because whenever there's ownership then what you're actually building is a self-image. That self-image is gonna pop sooner or later. The ultimate way in which to create something is to do it under the umbrella of self-forgetfulness because then you're really free.
You know you can wield the sword so freely when you yourself are wearing armor. When you yourself are exposed then you're going to wield the sword very carefully. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem with that is when you are wielding it carefully you will not be able to wield it with plum and the carefreeness that will allow you to achieve high arch. When you have armor on and no matter what you do you're not going to get hurt by it. Then you can do whatever you want and within that sort of relative carefree and cavalier approach magic happens.
When you have no self-image and nothing to protect you would say all kinds of things that you can’t say. There is no filter and quite frankly hesitation destroys the joy. When you want it to be proper/correct to make sure no one dislikes it, then there is no fun in that. The joy is in self-expression.
Self-image is a choice
Let’s say you’re running a business and there’s an image that you used to attract people, funding. Let’s say the business isn’t going well, and you need to tell people that you’re shutting down your business. It does hurt your self-image since you started with your self-image. Doesn't it seem disingenuous to use your image to start something and then discard your image later?
It depends on what’s okay and what’s not okay with you. When you have a self-image, it creates self-imprisonment. It comes down to what things you are willing and not willing to be imprisoned by.
Need for indifference
There’s something in the nature of human beings that respects indifference. Many times other human beings take the cue and mimic that. Let’s say a comedian says something insensitive. Later he says he shouldn’t have said that. Then the crowd is going to say that what he said was insensitive. In another similar case, the comedian says something insensitive and doesn’t give 2 cents. Then the crowd will mimic that as well. It is the nature of the human mind to use the individual as the standard by which one has to be judged or not.
Achieving indifference
It’s easy to be indifferent when your day is going easy, but when your day gets hard, especially in the context of business/people, your mind gets busy with emotions. How to be indifferent in such situations?
The problem here is you’re chasing indifference. Whenever you attempt to live up to anything you’ll fail. You’ll fail even if you live up to it. Because you’re trying to force yourself to get to an idea. The greatest individual be it in business/sport allows the game to come to them. All things must come to you and you cannot be a chaser. It’s a constant examination of where one is doing, and what feeling one is feeling without any sense of prescription. You’re not doing it in order to get better. You’re not doing it other than for a reason than you desperately wish to learn the truth. You want to see all the way to the end, you don’t want to work all way through the end. It’s understanding.
All these names (i.e. indifference) only have relevance when you have arrived and you’re looking backward. All those names are fine and won’t hurt you as long as you’ve arrived and then you’re looking backward. If you name them prospectively you’ll get attached to the name and you’ll chase and you’ll arrive nowhere.
Reference: Summary of conversation between Naval Ravikant and Kapil Gupta MD.