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Brené Brown: You Can’t Change Your Life Without Loving Yourself First
Being too lax about what you eat makes you unhealthy. Being too stressed about food makes you miserable (and possibly anorexic). Too much focus on others makes you a regret-filled doormat. Too little makes you a psychopath.
Life is about finding balance. And it’s the same with ambition.
If you don’t strive to be the best version of yourself, you’re leaving a lot of life on the table. You won’t develop your talents. You won’t examine your beliefs. You won’t work to improve yourself. On the other hand, if you’re always hunting the next win and pushing yourself to be better, you’re not going to enjoy the present or like yourself very much along the way. That’s no way to go through life.
How do you strike a balance?
That’s the incredibly tough and incredibly important question at the heart of a conversation between renowned researcher and blockbuster TED speaker Brené Brown and entrepreneur Tim Ferris for his podcast. The whole lengthy conversation is fascinating (seriously, find time to listen to it in full), but in the middle of the episode Brown makes a surprising but important point about the relationship between self-love and self-actualization — you’ve probably been thinking about them exactly backward.