The Ghost of Self-Image

What you will become is who you believe yourself to be. What you will become is what you cannot stop yourself from becoming. What you will achieve are the things that you cannot help but achieve. What you will accomplish are the things that you cannot live without accomplishing.

The search for happiness and pleasure is the most fruitless search of a human life. It is the single most critical reason why a human being lives in suffering.

It’s genuinely about seeing the emptiness of all things and that nothing has any significance … The ultimate truth is that there is nothing. There is no greater truth than that.

You’re not going to stop the mind from barking, and if you try to, you’ll be basically trying to bale water out of a sinking boat with a teacup for the rest of your life. Because the only reason that you’re trying to stop the mind from barking is the reason why it’s barking in the first place.

Everything operates according to its own rhythm. Everything operates according to its own cause and effect. And any attempt to interrupt that rhythm and any attempt to modify the effect that was naturally occurring by a particular cause is a road to suffering, pain, anxiety, and failure.

There’s no amount of behavior modification or rah-rah that I can fill you with to become the world’s greatest if your self-image and your DNA is not that of someone who must be great, who must be the greatest in the world.

A person who is conscious of his self... is a person who will always have insecurities about that self. So, a person is at his best when he isn’t aware of himself.

A person always defaults to his default. A person always becomes what he believes himself to be. You can behavior modify whatever you want. You can bring the whole coaching gang and the self-improvement fanatics and the rah-rah motivational speakers… At the end of the day... they will default by the time walk to their car.

The more critical the decision, the less reason there is to consult someone because that’s when it needs to be most pure.

Your fate is sealed by your DNA ... You are not going to change who you are, and self-improvement is a complete sham.

Everyone is predisposed to doing and pursuing that which is their greatest desire. You don’t desire in order to act; your actions determine your desires.

I don't think it's about winning and losing. I think that, on some level, everything is an individual sport. I think it's team from the outside, but on the inside and inside the human being, it's individual.

The person who examines himself to the utmost degree is the person who knows all human beings.

The more serious that someone is in guiding someone, the less they will preach to them. The more serious that someone is, the less they will answer their questions because all questions will come in the form of prescription ... Everyone is brainwashed by society into asking for prescriptions.