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How to Destroy Your 'Self' to Free Who You Are (3 Steps)
- Written by NelsonQuest
- October 1, 2022
Table of Contents
A quick note before we begin – this video details the extremely dark, painful and ultimately glorious process through which I was able to transform myself into a completely different person.
What I discovered, and the process I’m about to share with you guys… will probably make you uncomfortable, and possibly even upset, especially if you’re someone who believes that these sort of transformations can only be achieved through positive mindset and self-love.
I say this respectfully, but unlike the overwhelming majority of people who create content on this topic –
Not only have I actually achieved colossal transformations within each of my dimensions – but I’ve also spent years working to understand underlying psychology and mechanisms behind those transformations to the level that I can now articulate them to you – the viewer.
Regardless of who you are and what your beliefs are – if you truly want to get the most out of this video, all I ask is that you keep an open mind.
In first part of this down the concepts and exact process that were CRITICAL to my transformation.
And then at the end of the video, I’ll give you the exact formula that I used to reinvent myself from a powerless, futureless nobody, into a powerful, destiny-fulfilling somebody.
Lesson 1: The Self Is Not Something To Improve, It Is Something We Must Destroy
It’s no secret that I absolutely detest the industry of self-improvement.
The problem, ironically… starts with the name itself. The words ‘self-improvement’ positively reinforces the absolutely ridiculous idea that there is even a self to be improved.
EVERYTHING, and I very much mean EVERY SINGLE THING that we are seemingly powerless to improve about ourselves IS literally because of who we believe ourselves to be.
The ‘self’ is nothing more than a construct – the end product of a lifetime of accumulated attitudes, values and behaviors that we mistakenly come to believe are us –
This ‘idea’ that we carry of our ‘self’ – otherwise referred to as ‘self-image’ – can best be summed up with the following quote.
“I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am” - Charles Cooley
Otherwise referred to as the looking glass theory – it posits that ‘self’ is essentially just what we think other people think we are.
This is why so many of us work so hard to ‘project’ a self that is happy, hard-working, disciplined, and filled with purpose – even if we’re not really any of those things – because as long as we think that other people think we are those things, then WE think we are those things.
This is why when we try and fail to develop good habits, the real reason more often than not is because we’re blind to the truth that we are NOT who we project ourselves to be.
No – to the contrary, the overwhelming majority of us are weak, pathetic creatures who retreat to hedonistic pleasures like social media and Netflix in the face of anything that threatens the comfort that we are programmed to seek in every waking moment.
It’s why the overwhelming majority of people who project themselves to be improving, are not. They care more about the projection, because to them, the projection is the reality. True reality is irrelevant.
Our ‘self’ is also an accumulation of things.
We are born as nothing and with nothing, and then over time our ‘self’ accumulates things – mainly material things like clothes, cars, houses – but also ‘beliefs’ – how disciplined we are, how good-looking we are.
The more we have, the more we have to lose.
The more we believe ourselves to be something, the more risk we associate with taking action.
This is why most people who read self-help books take virtually no action – they’re terrified of shattering the illusion of their improved self that they’ve spent months or even years cultivating from the comfort of their sofa.
So this all brings me back to my original point – if the very idea of who we are IS what’s standing in the way of what we could become – why the fuck would we want to ‘improve’ that?
Why not just DESTROY it… and allow something far more powerful to emerge.
For me to be able to understand this lesson, I had to first lose everything.
Lesson 2: See Ourselves As We Really Are
The problem with this – and this was certainly my problem – is that we don’t dislike our ‘self’ enough to want to see it as anything other than what we want to see it as.
The old me was an idiot. He knew nothing of the world and had no curiosity to even want to learn, perhaps because he already thought he knew everything.
He spent his entire life following the path that society had laid out for him. He went to college for 5 years, studying a career he hated, only to finally earn a degree that he would NEVER use.
What ‘good’ habits he did have was entirely motivated by the pursuit of material and superficial bullshit that he never thought to question.
Then, at 26 years old, the girl of his dreams left him to go back to a previous boyfriend – a guy who was superior to me in ways that actually mattered.
He was worldly, virtuous, spiritual, philosophical. He had goals and purpose.
When it finally sunk in that the girl was never coming back to me, I sent this superior man an email where I shared very intimate details of our relationship – and email that was designed to devastate him…
However in a final earth-shattering display of superiority… he thanked me for sending the email and wished me well.
I spent the next few months spiraling deeper and deeper into depression until one day, the pain was so great that my entire concept of self – everything I believed myself to be and all of the things I had accumulated – NONE of it mattered.
By losing everything, the faulty notion of ‘self’ that I had spent an entire lifetime accumulating suddenly disintegrated into nothingness… I was free.
My new self was free to experience the raw energy of pain however it wanted, and as easily as one might decide to blink their eyes, I chose to now experience that energy as power.
Get the Dark Mode guide
The Dark Mode Guide
is a simple system designed to help you achieve a specific goal by facilitating the development of relevant habits and creating the perfect environment to make failure impossible.
This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.
Lesson 3: The Importance of Solitude
In the years following that epiphany moment, I spent virtually every second of everyday taking action to improve myself.
By far the most critically important element of all of this, is that I decided to completely remove myself from the world until this process had fully taken its course.
No TV. No social media. No interaction with friends and family.
My initial motivation for retreating into the shadows was that I wanted to absolutely blow everyone away with the new person that I had become when I re-emerged.
But after even just a few days of existing like this, solitude became the most important weapon in my self-transformation arsenal.
All of the external noise of life was gone. It was just me, alone in my apartment, with some books, a computer, and a massive amount of work to do with nothing to distract me from doing it.
I could no longer compare myself to others – I could only compare myself to who I had been yesterday, and who I could be tomorrow – and as I made rapid progress within each of my 4 dimensions, these comparisons became the most prideful aspect of my existence.
I had started training for an ironman, and within a few weeks I was training multiple hours every single day –
Every morning began with swimming in an ice cold public pool – Every evening ended with long jogs into and out of New York City – And every weekend featured a 6 to 8 hour bike ride through New Jersey.
ALL of this training was performed in complete and total silence.
In each individual second I found myself making a choice between taking it easy or giving it my all – my ‘old’ self and my ‘new’ self engaged in all out war – a war that raged for one year and two months until it was finally race day.
By the time I set up on the starting line, I had severe plantar fasciitis in both feet, impingement syndrome in both of my shoulders, and a torn bicep muscle that forced me to let my arm dangle when I jogged…
but my ‘new’ self was all that remained.
Oh, and by the way – by the time I did re-emerge, everyone I knew was completely blown away by my transformation, but that mattered a lot less to me now.
I was just getting started.
Conclusion
I know that a lot of people are going to critique these techniques – trust me when I say that the overwhelming majority of them literally have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.
What I’ve shared in this video are just my experiences, research, and opinions. Always do what you feel is right.
Make sure to follow me on Instagram @nelsonquest – there’s so much more I want to share in these videos that’s much easier for me to share there.
And lastly, don’t just subscribe to my YT channel, but if you want to be notified first when I release new videos then make SURE to click the notification bell – unless you’re too busy thinking positive thoughts or masturbating to yourself in a mirror over the idea of how great you are, in that case…
This is the path.
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