Why you’re not sabotaging yourself is simpler than a willpower problem. You’re living what you really value, and it already shows in how you fill your space, where your time and money go, where you’re organized and disciplined, and what you think and talk about most. Dr. John Demartini calls these value determinants. Once you can see your real values, you have two choices. Set goals that match them, or change your values to match your goals.

A couple of nights before we recorded this episode, I went to one of John’s events. It was about a two-hour session and I could see people all over the room having breakthroughs. So when he sat down with me for the podcast (it went up in August 2016), I had a list of questions I didn’t get to ask that night.

The answer that stuck with me most came near the end. I asked him about people who keep sabotaging themselves with money. He told me he doesn’t even like the word. More on that below, because it’s the most useful reframe in the whole conversation.

Why what you say you value isn’t what you really value

John has written over a hundred books, including The Values Factor, and in my intro I said he’d read close to 30,000 books. His whole body of work comes back to one idea. Everybody lives by a set of priorities, from most important to least important, and your life already demonstrates them.

The problem is that if you ask people what their values are, they hand you what he called “social idealisms.” Family. Health. Kindness. Wealth. The stuff that sounds right.

He brought up the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg here. As John put it, most people are either avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, subordinating to mothers, fathers, preachers and teachers, or following the herd of whatever their society says is normal. Very few are living by what they actually value.

Then he said the line I want you to remember:

“I’m not interested in what people say. I’m interested in what they’re living.”

He also warned about injecting other people’s values into your life. Learning from mentors is smart. Trying to be somebody you’re not, in his words, is “almost guaranteed to be self-defeating.”

How to tell what you really value: the value determinants

When I asked how we become more conscious of our values, John listed the questions he uses. Answer them honestly, based on what you actually do and not what you wish you did:

• How do you fill your space? What’s sitting around you right now?
• What do you spend your time on?
• What energizes you?
• What do you spend your money on most?
• Where are you most organized?
• Where are you most disciplined?
• What do you think about, visualize and affirm to yourself most, and is it already coming true?
• What do you love talking to other people about?
• What inspires you, and what do the people who inspire you have in common?
• What’s a goal that’s persisted in your life and keeps getting achieved?
• What do you love learning about?

Look for the answers that repeat. That’s your real hierarchy, not the one you’d put on a vision board. John has a free version of this on his site, the Demartini Value Determination process. He said it takes about 30 minutes, and you can come back every three months to see how your values are shifting.

Here’s the one that hit me personally. I said to the audience, look at your library. What books are in it right now? It’ll show you what you value most. Then I had to admit something on air. I know for sure I don’t have enough books on finance. I wasn’t struggling, but I felt like I could be doing a lot better. John said he’d read about 1,400 books on finance and economics. That’s the difference in one shelf.

Why you’re not sabotaging yourself

This is the part I mentioned at the top. I asked John whether people who can’t get ahead financially are sabotaging themselves because they can’t hold the money in their container.

He pushed back straight away. He said he doesn’t find sabotage a productive word, because when someone says they’re sabotaging themselves, it means they don’t know what their real values are. They keep expecting to live by somebody else’s values. When their actions keep following their own, they call it sabotage.

Once they see their real values, he said, the story changes. They stop seeing sabotage and start seeing decisions that make perfect sense. “No wonder I keep doing that.”

I think that’s more useful than any amount of beating yourself up. You’re not broken. You’re doing exactly what your real values tell you to do. If you don’t like the results, the fix is the values or the goal, not more willpower.

Your spending already shows what you really value

I told John that so many people live in the fantasy of being wealthy. They see the glitz and the glamour, and it ends up being more of a nightmare than a fantasy.

He said he’s asked millions of people worldwide if they want to be financially independent. They all put their hands up. But in their minds they’re picturing the lifestyles of the rich and famous. They’re spending on depreciables and consumables that won’t build an asset base. In his experience, 1% or less actually want to study the numbers, study investments and patiently build assets over time.

His line was blunt: “Tell me what you value most, I’m going to show you where your money is going to go.”

Think of the person who says they can’t get ahead, then keeps spending on clothes, trips and instant gratification. In his view, they don’t really want to be wealthy. They want to live the things they keep doing. He said he’s interviewed billionaires and people who are broke, and the ones who are committed to building wealth have it in their top four values. The others don’t.

That’s not investment advice, and it isn’t a judgment on anyone’s spending. It’s a mirror. If you want the mindset side of money, read how to change your money blueprint before it caps your income. Here, the question is simpler. Does your bank statement agree with what you say you want?

The only two ways to fulfillment

John said there are only two ways to have fulfillment. Set goals that match your values, or change your values to match your goals. They have to be congruent.

To change a value, you stack up associations. List the benefits of something you want to rise on your value list and it goes up, because now you have more reasons to do it. List the drawbacks of something you want to drop and it goes down.

I asked if that’s just putting pen to pad. He said no. Writing it is an inventory, but you have to actually feel those benefits and drawbacks until they change your perception. He gave the example of an eight-year-old girl singing in front of 400 people at school. If they give her a standing ovation, she’ll want to sing again. If she forgets her words and people walk out, she probably won’t. We already move through our values based on pains and pleasures. You can let the world do that to you, or you can take command of it.

For wealth specifically, his process went like this:

1. Find out where wealth building actually sits on your value list.
2. Raise it, using that stacking process.
3. Link what you need to learn to the values you already have.
4. Learn the way you learn best. Visual, auditory or kinesthetic. YouTube, mentors and small chunks of reading all count.

He said you don’t have to read books to become financially savvy. He’s had mentors in almost every area of finance, and one hour with them is sometimes better than the book. Everybody loves learning what’s important to them.

Inspiration vs motivation

I asked John the difference, and his answer is the simplest I’ve heard. When you live by your highest value, you’re inspired from within. Nobody has to remind you. As you go down the list, things get more extrinsic, and you need outside motivation to do them.

His highest value is researching and teaching. He said he does it every day and doesn’t miss one. Domestic stuff? He said he’s about as domestic as a cockroach. He made a list of what he loves (research, writing, traveling and teaching) and delegated everything else.

I jumped in with “high income generating activities.” He added one word: meaning. You want income because it means you’re serving others, and meaning because it’s serving you. Put the two together and you’ve got your niche.

If you’re still doing every low-priority task in your business yourself, that’s often the real reason you’re burned out. And John didn’t think burnout comes from hours. He said people doing what they love can go 18 hours a day without feeling stressed, while someone forcing themselves through uninspiring work for that long is heading for a heart attack. He also said that whenever you’re not fulfilling your highest values, you increase the odds of addictive, compulsive behavior to compensate.

I told him about a mate of mine who’s worth hundreds of millions and is happy and grateful all the time. I was standing there when somebody asked if he ever burns out. He laughed and said he wasn’t a candle. John’s take: he’s doing something meaningful and serving a lot of people.

John went further on the brain side, too. He believes that when you work toward your highest values, the brain remodels itself to support it, and the executive center lights up. He also said the brain is about 10% neurons and 90% glia, and that the study of glial cells will matter as much as neurology in the decades ahead. Take that as John’s view, not settled science. He also recalled Deepak Chopra’s Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: live on purpose and you age differently.

Where entrepreneurs get their values wrong

I asked if there’s anything apart from values that holds people back. He said one of the most unwise things an entrepreneur does is assume what’s important to them is important to everybody. They come out with a cool idea and spend years fighting uphill.

He described two overlapping circles, like a vesica piscis. One is what you’re inspired to do. The other is what people are inspired to receive. The center is where the power is. If you can’t wait to get up in the morning and deliver it, and they can’t wait to get it, you’ve found your niche.

Can everybody be an entrepreneur? He said the capacity is in everyone, though not everyone will use it. He’s seen people who worked for security their whole lives find that overlap and take off.

What self-love has to do with your values

I get emails about this all the time, so I asked: how do we love ourselves more?

John said the only time we don’t appreciate ourselves is when we compare our daily actions to other people’s values that we’ve injected into our lives. Live by your own and you can look in the mirror and say thank you. He told me a Vogue magazine interviewer once asked who he’d be if he could be anyone in the world. His answer: “I have no desire to be anybody but me.”

His last 30-second speech was the same idea. Look in the mirror and know that no matter what you’ve done or not done, you’re worthy of love. And give yourself permission to do something extraordinary.

Here’s my take. Most people already know what they really value. They just don’t like the answer. So pull up your calendar, your bank statement and your bookshelf this week, write down what they say, and decide which way you’re going. Change the goal or change the value. Knowing this and doing nothing with it is the same as not knowing.

FAQ

How do you know what you really value?

Look at your actions, not your words. Dr. John Demartini’s value determinants ask how you fill your space, spend your time and money, where you’re organized and disciplined, and what you think, talk and love learning about. The answers that repeat are your real values.

What is the difference between inspiration and motivation?

Inspiration comes from your highest values, so you act without reminders or rewards. Motivation is the outside push you need for things lower on your value list. Demartini says the further down the list a task sits, the more motivation it takes.

Is self-sabotage really a values mismatch?

Demartini says what people call sabotage usually means they’re judging themselves by someone else’s values while acting on their own. Once you see your real values, the pattern looks like a decision, not a failure, and you can change the goal or the value.

Can you change your values?

Yes. Demartini’s method is to stack associations. Link many real benefits to a value you want to rise and drawbacks to one you want to drop, and actually feel them. The alternative is setting goals that match the values you already have.

Why can’t I get ahead financially if I want to be wealthy?

Demartini’s view is that your spending follows your values. If money keeps going to consumables instead of building assets, wealth building probably isn’t high on your value list yet. That’s a values question first, not a willpower one. Speak to a licensed advisor for financial advice.

Most people want to move forward in their careers, but knowing exactly how to do it isn’t always easy. You might be putting in the hours, meeting deadlines, and doing everything your manager expects, yet still feel like you’re standing in the same place professionally.

Working hard certainly matters, but career growth often requires more than dedication. The people who find new opportunities tend to pay attention to where their industries are heading, build useful relationships, and make deliberate decisions about their professional development.

You don’t necessarily need to change jobs or completely reinvent yourself to make progress. Sometimes, a few well-timed decisions can have a much greater impact than years of simply waiting for the next promotion.

Here are five career moves worth considering if you’re ready for bigger opportunities.

1. Develop Skills That Make You More Valuable

One of the smartest investments you can make in your career is learning something that increases your professional value. Industries change, technology evolves, and employers regularly adjust what they expect from their employees. Skills that helped you land your current position may not be enough to qualify you for the next one.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, employers expect significant changes in workforce skill requirements over the coming years.

A few findings from major workplace reports highlight why professional development deserves attention:

• 39% of workers’ existing skill sets are expected to change or become outdated between 2025 and 2030, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025.
• 93% of talent acquisition professionals believe accurately assessing candidates’ skills is essential to improving hiring quality, according to LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting 2025 report.
• 51% of American employees were actively looking for another job or watching for opportunities in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Gallup’s workforce research.

These findings suggest that remaining competitive requires preparation, especially when many other professionals are exploring their options. Start by looking at job descriptions for positions you’d eventually like to hold. Notice which skills appear repeatedly and compare those requirements with your current abilities.

You might discover that improving your data analysis, communication, project management, or leadership skills could help you qualify for more advanced positions.

You don’t need to learn everything at once. Choose one relevant skill and find practical ways to develop it through courses, workplace projects, or independent learning.

2. Make Your Professional Achievements More Visible

Doing excellent work is important, but people also need to understand what you’ve accomplished. Many professionals underestimate their experience because they focus on everyday responsibilities rather than the results of their efforts. They might describe themselves as responsible for managing projects without mentioning that they consistently delivered those projects ahead of schedule.

There’s a meaningful difference between explaining what you do and showing the value you bring. For example, instead of saying you handled customer communications, you could explain how you improved response times, resolved recurring issues, or helped retain important accounts.

This approach is particularly useful when updating your resume, preparing for interviews, or discussing advancement opportunities with your manager.

If you haven’t updated your resume in a while, there’s a good chance it doesn’t reflect everything you’ve accomplished. New responsibilities, completed projects and skills you’ve developed over the years can easily get overlooked when you’re used to focusing on your daily work. When updating your resume, resources such as Zety’s free resume builder can help you structure that information and decide how to present your experience. The important part is making sure your resume reflects not just the positions you’ve held, but also the contributions you’ve made and how you’ve grown professionally.

Keep a personal record of successful projects, new responsibilities, and positive feedback throughout the year. Having those details available makes it much easier to explain your professional progress when an unexpected opportunity appears.

3. Build Relationships Before You Need Them

Professional networking sometimes gets treated as something you do only when searching for a job. In reality, meaningful relationships can be valuable throughout your career. A former colleague might introduce you to someone working in your desired industry. A professional connection could recommend a useful training program, share an upcoming opportunity, or offer advice about a career decision.

These connections rarely develop overnight, which is why building relationships before you need assistance makes sense. Start with people you already know. Reconnect with former coworkers, stay in touch with mentors, and take an interest in what others are working on. You can also attend industry events, join professional communities, or have thoughtful conversations on LinkedIn.

The key is to approach networking as an opportunity to exchange knowledge rather than immediately asking for favors. When someone shares an interesting project, ask about their experience. If you come across an article that might help a colleague, send it their way. Small interactions like these help maintain professional relationships without making every conversation feel transactional.

Over time, you’ll develop a network of people who understand your interests, recognize your strengths, and may think of you when relevant opportunities arise.

4. Take on Responsibilities That Challenge You

It’s easy to become comfortable doing work you already know how to handle. You understand the expectations, spot potential problems, and can complete most tasks with little difficulty. While that familiarity can make your workday easier, it doesn’t always encourage professional growth.

Taking on new responsibilities gives you the chance to develop abilities that your current position might not otherwise require. Suppose you’re working in marketing and want to move into a management role. Volunteering to coordinate a small campaign could give you experience with planning, delegation, and communication.

Similarly, someone interested in operations might benefit from helping improve an inefficient internal process. You don’t have to wait for a formal promotion to begin developing these abilities.

Look for manageable opportunities to contribute beyond your usual responsibilities, particularly when they align with the direction you want your career to take. Of course, taking initiative shouldn’t mean accepting unlimited additional work. Before agreeing to a new project, consider whether it offers useful experience and whether you have enough time to complete it properly. The goal is to become more capable, not simply busier.

5. Make Career Decisions With a Long-Term Plan

A higher salary or impressive job title can make an opportunity attractive, but neither automatically guarantees meaningful career progress. Before making a major professional move, think about where you’d like to be in three to five years.

Do you want to manage a team, specialize in a particular field, work independently, or eventually start your own business? Your answer can help you evaluate which opportunities are actually worth pursuing.

For example, a position offering a modest salary increase but greater responsibility might provide valuable experience for someone hoping to enter management. On the other hand, a higher-paying position with limited development opportunities may not be ideal if you’re still trying to build important skills.

Consider the people you’ll work with, the knowledge you’ll gain, and the professional options a position might create later. It’s also worth reviewing your goals periodically. Personal priorities change, and the career path that made sense several years ago might no longer fit your circumstances. You don’t need a perfectly detailed plan for the next decade. Having a general direction, however, helps you make more intentional decisions instead of accepting every opportunity that comes along.

Final Thoughts

Career growth doesn’t always happen through dramatic changes. Often, it comes from smaller decisions that gradually improve your professional position. Learning relevant skills, communicating your achievements, building relationships, accepting useful challenges, and thinking carefully about your future can all contribute to greater opportunities.

Not every effort will produce immediate results. Some relationships take years to become valuable, while certain skills only become useful when the right position opens up. What matters is continuing to prepare yourself for opportunities rather than assuming they’ll appear simply because you’ve worked hard.

The next significant step in your career might begin with a decision you make today.

To define success for yourself, strip out every goal you borrowed from someone else, then ask what you actually want the money, the title or the attention to give you. Usually it’s freedom, security, significance or power, and some of that doesn’t need a bank balance at all. Write your own version down, then check that you’re ready, willing and able to go after it.

I gave the talk above when I was 29, with no notes and no structure. People always asked me for the techniques and the hacks. Here’s what I told that room instead. “A lot of people see the glory, but they don’t actually see the story.” The website, the movies, the magazine covers are just the highlight reel. The lessons are in the hard yards before any of that, and a lot of mine came from chasing success that wasn’t mine.

Before my story, I asked the room how old they were when they first fell in love with self-development. One man said four. He’d sat on the porch of his great-grandmother’s school teacher, a woman born a slave, and she told him nothing could stop him. It didn’t come from a book. It came from one person who meant it.

Why you keep chasing someone else’s definition of success

The line I want you to take from that speech is this: stop chasing unicorns, AKA somebody else’s definition of success.

For years I put successful people on a pedestal because I hadn’t developed my own story yet. When you don’t know what you want, you grab the nearest picture of success and run at it.

The people you admire are great. But ask the better question: where does that greatness lie in them, and where does it lie in you? Go for that. Whatever you call it (your personal definition of success, what success means to you), it has to come from inside, or you’ll get there and feel nothing.

The glory vs the story: how I got it wrong first

My story starts at about seven years old with Space Jam. I got my mum to buy me a plastic six-foot ring and jumped off bricks to dunk on it. I told her I wanted to be like Michael Jordan. She told me I could be Joel. She handed me Michael Jordan’s Rare Air, my first exposure to training your mind and surrounding yourself with people better than you.

She also gave me a book called 50 Ways to Make Pocket Money. I tried about 20 of them. The one that hit: I earned $50 working for the next-door neighbor over the holidays, spent it on Toblerone bars and mint patties, and knocked on doors selling them back to the neighbors at double the price. I think they felt sorry for me. Then I put the profit into limited-edition NBA cards and traded them at school. I didn’t feel like I had limits.

Then I hit year eight, still 12, and Mum started saying the same thing every morning when I jumped out of the car: “Take a risk. Try something different.” So that year I punched someone out for messing with my mates, let off a flamethrower in the middle of science class and stole chocolates from the grocery store across the road and got arrested. She pulled me aside and explained that wasn’t the kind of risk she meant.

Her next move was Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. A lot of it went over my head at 12, but two ideas stuck. A nine-to-five job is less stable than it looks, because you can lose it and the economy can crash. And you don’t have to work for money, you can make money work for you.

I got the dream job and felt empty

As a teenager I went all in on hip-hop. I knocked on a radio station’s door week after week until they let me intern for free. Then I told American record labels I could get their music played on one of Australia’s biggest hip-hop and R&B stations. I couldn’t, really. But the exclusives arrived, and eventually the station manager gave me my own midnight show. It took off. I interviewed big artists, shopped beats from producer friends, and at about 20 I scored a record deal with Atlantic Records and moved to Miami.

That was the glory. Within about two years I was waking up every day feeling empty. I had no control. That line about making money work for you kept coming back, so I walked away, and my friends and family thought I’d lost it.

Flying home to Perth, I missed my connection and ended up in a San Francisco motel at 2 a.m., asking myself if I’d made the right decision. A Tony Robbins infomercial was on the TV. I went home, got into his books, put them down because I wasn’t ready yet, and took a sales job because I was driven by money.

The CEO brought in Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street, who by then was teaching sales the ethical way. In a workshop he challenged me to write down my vision for success, my strengths, my passions and the solution I was bringing to the world, then read it out in front of everyone. My answer: I love self-development and I’m good with computers, so I could share inspiring ideas with the world. That’s how Addicted2Success started.

Freedom, not money: the desert job that showed me the difference

I got Ds and Fs in high school English, so I believed I couldn’t write. Then my first article for the site went viral. So did the next one. People didn’t want a research paper. They wanted it straight and simple.

Money was still my motivation, though. I took a job up north in the Australian desert with an environmental team clearing land for Chevron, catching snakes, lizards and kangaroos in heat I remember as about 132 degrees Fahrenheit. It was 28 days on, a week off, and a lot of negative people around me. So I’d jump in the car and play Tony Robbins tapes to unplug from it. His message was that when your back’s against the wall, you burn the boats. There’s no other option.

I doubled my content and started networking. In about three months back then, the site jumped from around 400,000 views to over a million, and I was making about $6,000 a month from advertising. Then I walked in and fired my boss.

Here’s the part that matters. Driving home that day, I booked a trip to Italy. I’d never been to Europe. And it hit me: “I was looking for freedom, not money itself.”

Get out of the paper prison

A lot of people are in what I call the paper prison. They’re trapped in the idea of why they need money, and they’ve never asked how they actually value it. Some people want money for significance. Some want power. Some want security. Some want freedom. What they don’t realize is they can find some of those things without the physical money itself.

This isn’t a wealth-building lesson. If you want that side, read how to change your money blueprint before it caps your income. This is about your definition of success. If what you really want is freedom, then a job that pays more but owns every hour of your week isn’t success, no matter how it looks on paper. Name what the money is standing in for, then look for the most direct way to get that thing.

Commit long enough for the truth to show up

About three years in, the site had reached around 40 million views worldwide and over 2 million followers on social media, and I got to interview Tony Robbins. I asked him how the real people stand apart from the flood of coaches, bloggers and YouTubers. As I remember it, he said the cream rises to the top. A lot of people aren’t willing to master, they dabble. Even if you work slowly, if you commit to something for ten years minimum, you’ll be the one who hung in there and the one who gets remembered.

Then I asked what we could actually act on. His answer, as I recall it, was that the biggest advantage you can have in business and in life is truth, and the only way to get truth is through experience. You have to get your hands dirty.

I was a guy behind a blog doing little podcast interviews, so I had to ask myself if I was really getting my hands dirty. I started stretching. Not so much that I’d snap, but enough to grow. I jumped in front of a camera. At first it took a bunch of takes. Now it’s one take. That’s why I’m blunt about people being addicted to information instead of execution. You can’t read your way into your own definition of success. You have to test it.

Ready, willing and able: the three zones of excellence

After interviewing hundreds of successful people, I kept looking for the pattern under what they said. I boiled it down to three zones of excellence:

• Beliefs (ready). Your mindset, and knowing the direction you’re going in.
• Habits (willing). The daily energy bolts of action. Fifty swings at a big tree in one day won’t knock it down. Swing at it every day and eventually it falls.
• Skills (able). Mechanical skills, like learning Photoshop or speaking better, and emotional skills, like how you communicate with people.

You can’t skip one. Imagine you’re ready and willing to be a doctor, and someone comes in who needs a leg amputated a certain way. You’ve got a chainsaw and no skill. You’re going to make a mess. When a client tells me they can’t make something happen, I run the three zones and we can usually pinpoint it. Usually it’s the habits or the mindset they haven’t followed through on.

Turn up the volume on the whispers of wisdom

Looking back from seven years old to 29, my purpose kept giving me little nudges. The books. Tony on a motel TV. Jordan Belfort making me write it down. I call them whispers of wisdom. My friend Peta Kelly calls it the quiet tap on the shoulder. I fought them for years because I thought I knew best.

Everyone has heard them. Some of you just have the volume turned down. Crank it up.

The Christian speaker Myles Munroe, who died in a plane crash in the Bahamas in 2014, made a point I love. A manufacturer doesn’t build a product and then say, let’s see what it’s for. The purpose comes first. The way I heard it, God made us the same way, with a purpose already inside us. Your job is to keep listening for it.

The one-week-to-live test

I live up in the mountains in Santa Barbara, and in the mornings my friend Joe and I stand on the balcony and practice our gratitudes. Gratitude, meditation and networking are the habits I’ve seen come up again and again with the people I interview. One morning, out of nowhere, Joe asked me: if you had one week to live, what would you do?

Nobody had ever asked me that. I told him I’d spend 24 hours with someone filming me, spilling out everything I know for anyone to use, kind of like Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. I’d been offered millions for Addicted2Success at that point, but if nobody would pay that on the day, I’d sell it for something like $500,000 and fly my friends from around the world to the southwest coast of Australia for a final party on a big boat.

Joe said, “Isn’t that interesting?” All the things I was doing to make more money and build the business didn’t matter in my final days. “You’re not going for the money, are you?” Then he asked how I could start operating from that place a little more. Not fully, because that would be irresponsible. Just more.

That’s the best tool I’ve found to define success for yourself. Answer Joe’s question honestly and you’ll see which goals you borrowed.

How to define success for yourself in 5 steps

1. Answer the one-week question. Write what you’d do with seven days left. That list is closer to your real definition of success than your vision board.
2. Name what money is standing in for. Significance, power, security or freedom. Then find a way to get some of it now, without waiting for a number.
3. Audit your unicorns. List the people whose lives you’re chasing. For each one, write the greatness you see in them and where that same thing lives in you.
4. Check ready, willing and able. Is your belief there? Are your daily habits there? Do you have the mechanical and emotional skills? Fix the weakest zone first.
5. Commit and stretch. Pick a timeline long enough for truth to show up, think years rather than weeks, and stretch enough to grow without snapping.

It would be a damn shame to die without giving the world your unique gifts and your unique greatness. Stop chasing the glory you saw on someone else’s page, and start writing your own story.

FAQ

How do you define success for yourself?

Remove the goals you borrowed from other people, then ask what you want money, status or attention to give you. Write that down in your own words. Test it with one question: if you had one week to live, would you still want it?

What does it mean to chase someone else’s definition of success?

It means copying another person’s goals, lifestyle or numbers without knowing whether they fit you. I call it chasing unicorns. You can admire someone, but look for where their greatness also lives in you and build from that instead.

What is the paper prison?

The paper prison is being trapped by your need for money without knowing what you value it for. People usually want significance, power, security or freedom. Some of those can be found without the physical money itself, which changes what success looks like.

What are the three zones of excellence?

Beliefs, habits and skills, or ready, willing and able. Beliefs give you direction, habits are the daily action, and skills are both mechanical and emotional. You need all three. Being ready and willing with no skill still makes a mess.

Is it wrong to define success by money?

No, but money is usually a stand-in for something else. When I fired my boss and booked a trip to Italy, I realized I’d been chasing freedom, not money itself. Name the feeling you want, and you’ll make better decisions about how to get it.

Confidence vs ego comes down to where your belief comes from. Confidence is earned: it rests on work you’ve actually done, like knowing you can run five miles today because you ran five yesterday. Ego is stolen: it’s belief you haven’t earned yet, borrowed at a very high interest rate, and it cuts you off from the feedback and reality you need to get better.

That’s the distinction Ryan Holiday gave me when he came on my podcast in 2016, right after Ego Is the Enemy came out. He was about to turn 29. I was reading the book at the time and told him it felt like my whole world was in it. My first question was simple: why is ego the enemy? His answer didn’t give me a definition to memorize. It gave me a test I could run on myself. “Confidence is earned,” he said, “and ego is stolen.”

What’s the difference between confidence and ego?

Ryan was clear he wasn’t talking about Freud. He meant ego in the everyday sense, and he leaned on the football coach Bill Walsh, who described it as the point where “self-confidence becomes arrogance.” In Ryan’s words on the show, ego is the line we cross when “our confidence, our assuredness, our ambition stops being a productive fuel and starts becoming a form of self-sabotage.”

Then he made it concrete. “I’m confident I could run 5 miles this afternoon because I ran 5 miles yesterday and I’ve been training.” Ego is the other voice: “Of course I could run a marathon. I’m the best there ever was.” The first is based on evidence. The second, as Ryan put it, is “what we wish was true rather than what actually is true.”

Here’s the quick version:

Psychologists draw a similar line. Researchers separate authentic pride from hubristic pride: the first comes from effort and real skill, the second from feeling superior. Same idea. One is earned, one is taken.

When ego does the most damage

Ryan said ego is dangerous at two very different points in a career. The first is the start. You tell yourself, “I got this. Of course, this is going to be easy.” You underestimate how much real work it takes, and you quit halfway because it turned out harder than you thought. The person who expected it to be hard is the one who keeps going.

The second point is worse. It’s right after some success, when you start believing “everything we do turns to gold” and that it can never be taken away. That’s when people implode and wreck the thing they worked so hard to build.

What struck me is that ego doesn’t only talk when things go well. Ryan said when we fail, the same voice whispers, “They screwed you over. This isn’t fair.” I said it sounded like it’s on the same volume but just changes channel depending on where you are in life. Ryan brought up Anne Lamott, who calls that station KFKD, and said to turn it off. If the praise puffs you up, the trolls will flatten you. Ignore both and do work you’re proud of.

Purpose vs passion: why Ryan said don’t be passionate

Chapter four of the book is called “Don’t Be Passionate,” which sounds strange when everyone’s been told to follow their passion. Ryan’s point was that passion without direction is chaos. Purpose is “organized and deliberate,” and it’s aimed at something.

He gave two examples. George Bush was passionate about invading Iraq. Christopher McCandless was passionate about going into the wild, and he died out there. Then he made it practical. If you were hiring, you wouldn’t take someone unqualified, in debt and unreliable just because they’re “really passionate.” You’d want someone mature who shows up on time and is ready to learn. “I think you’ve got to apply that standard to yourself.”

That reminded me of something a friend had told me about relationships. He said love isn’t enough; effort is what’s required. “I love airplanes, but I don’t know how to fly one. I love sports cars, but I don’t know how to fix one.” You need a manual. You have to study, sit the test and do the practical. Business is the same. A lot of people get into it on love alone, without the effort, and the difference between being interested and being committed shows up the moment the work gets boring.

Ryan’s version for writers was blunt. Passion for an idea gets you to about chapter five. After that the words stop coming easily, and you need a deep love of the practice plus a real goal to get you through the editing, the marketing and the next book.

How to take feedback without letting ego defend the work

This is where the confidence vs ego test really earns its keep. Ryan said you need “enough confidence to be sure of what you know you absolutely need to have in the project but then enough humility and open-mindedness that you can take input.”

He lived it on this book. Early readers told him the intro and conclusion were basically in the wrong order, and he restructured it. Then he sent a galley, the near-final version, to Tim Ferriss. By that stage you’re not really supposed to make changes. Tim sent back a long list anyway. Ryan said it would have been easy to say it’s too late and the publisher will be mad. Instead he looked at the notes honestly and decided Tim was right. His estimate: the book got about 15% better.

I told him what I believe about this: “You’ve got to always be in the student chair.” You sit there and say, okay, I don’t know everything, and that’s fine. Ryan added that it’s easier when the feedback comes from someone you respect, which is one more reason to keep people around who are better than you.

Then he gave me a filter he credited to Neil Gaiman. Gaiman’s own wording, from his rules for writing in The Guardian, is: “when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” So keep the first part and question the second. Something isn’t landing. Your job is to figure out why, not to argue.

Impatience is ego in disguise

Ryan sold his first book, Trust Me, I’m Lying, when he was 24. He was so convinced it had to come out right now that they didn’t even do galleys. Looking back, with the book still selling five years later, he said he obviously could have waited. “We want people to recognize how smart we are and before the work is out, that can’t happen.” That rush is ego. Every reader who picked up a weaker version is someone you have to work hard to win back.

I’d had a conversation with John C. Maxwell, who told me your first book is probably your worst. Ryan agreed and said he’s proud of that. Getting better with each thing you make is the point. He also said you have to be OK with a world where the book sells one copy, because the only thing you control is the work. If you can think that way, two readers feels lucky and a thousand feels like a miracle.

4 ways to keep confidence from turning into ego

When I asked Ryan for steps people could use right now, he didn’t give me affirmations. He gave me habits.

1. Train plus, minus and equal. Ryan borrowed this from Frank Shamrock, the mixed martial arts pioneer and UFC champion. Every fighter trains with someone better (plus), someone equal and someone they’re teaching (minus). The plus shows you what you’re doing wrong. The equal keeps you honest. The minus makes you explain it, and teaching is often the best way to learn. Ryan said you should have all three at work, at home and among your friends.
2. Turn dead time into live time. This one came from Robert Greene. Stuck in traffic, waiting out a contract or sitting in a dead-end job, you decide whether that time is dead or alive. “Often times we waste time out of ego,” Ryan said. If someone’s 30 minutes late, you can spend it calling them a rude jerk or you can read. He showed me a note card from his desk about Ian Fleming, who was forbidden a typewriter while recovering from a heart attack and wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by hand in the hospital.
3. Get small on purpose. Ryan quoted Bertrand Russell, who wrote in The Conquest of Happiness that “one of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” A couple of times while writing, Ryan had to tell himself, “It’s just a book, man.” He started spending more time walking in the woods, on a beach in the middle of the night, on top of a mountain. It’s hard to feel full of yourself there. He meditates, too, and said it’s hard to have ego when you’re focused on the present moment. Back then I was living in Santa Barbara out in the mountains, and I spun the camera around to show him the view of the ocean and the valleys where I’d sit and meditate. He also said his relationship keeps him honest: if the book is amazing but it costs the person you love, is that really winning?
4. Take pride only in what you control. Ryan pointed to Michael Bloomberg, who has said, “I’m not smarter than anybody else, but I can outwork you.” You don’t control your IQ. You control your hours, your research and how much you put in. That’s where confidence should live.

You choose the ending of every story

Near the end I brought up a picture quote my friend Alexi had shared that morning. It went something like: was it really a bad day, or did you just milk a five-minute problem?

Ryan tied it straight to the Stoics. “You choose the ending to every story.” If someone’s rude to you at breakfast, you decide whether that ruins your day or stays an insignificant moment. They don’t get the other 23 hours unless you hand them over.

Here’s how I see it play out. We give an event a meaning. Keep repeating that meaning and it becomes a mood. Hold the mood long enough and it solidifies into a belief, and now it’s part of your programming, running your life without you noticing. Ryan took it one step further: you start making decisions from that belief. You’re in a bad mood, so you’re rude to someone who works for you, they stop trying as hard, they make a mistake, and now things really are bad. Ego turns a five-minute problem into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you want the practical side of that, the Stoic dichotomy of control is the tool. Ryan’s last 30 seconds came back to the same place. He reached for Kurt Vonnegut, whose advice boils down to be kind, and then the Stoic line he tries to live by: you don’t control what happens to you, you control how you respond.

Here’s where I land

Ego is sneaky because it feels like confidence. It even sounds like it. The difference is the receipt. Before you back yourself, ask what work you’re standing on. If you can point to the miles, the reps, the drafts and the notes you took, that’s confidence and you should use it. If all you’ve got is a feeling that you’re special, you’re borrowing, and the bill always comes.

So this week, find your plus, your equal and your minus. Pick one stretch of dead time and make it live. And the next time someone tells you something isn’t working, say thank you before you say anything else.

FAQ

What is the difference between confidence and ego?

Confidence is belief backed by real work and evidence, like knowing you can run five miles because you ran five yesterday. Ego is belief you haven’t earned, based on what you wish were true. As Ryan Holiday put it, confidence is earned and ego is stolen.

Is confidence the same as arrogance?

No. Confidence stays connected to reality and stays open to feedback. Arrogance is what happens when confidence goes past what you’ve earned. Bill Walsh described ego as the point where self-confidence becomes arrogance.

How do I know if I’m acting from ego or confidence?

Check how you react to feedback. If notes feel like an attack, or you’re rushing to be recognized before the work is ready, that’s ego. If you can point to the work behind your belief and still take notes, that’s confidence.

How do you build confidence without ego?

Train with someone better, someone equal and someone you teach. Use waiting time to read or think instead of complaining. Spend time in nature, and take pride only in what you control, like the hours and research you put in.

What did Ryan Holiday say about confidence vs ego?

On my podcast in 2016, Ryan Holiday said confidence is based on what’s real and earned through work, while ego is stolen, borrowed at a very high interest rate. He warned that ego does the most damage at the start of a career and right after success.