Life is one part competition and one part cooperation. Competition between you, your tribe and other people and their tribes for food, clothing, shelter, resources, status, money and women.
Cooperation for the all the above as being kind to strangers and helping people in need.
Some people don’t want to accept the necessary competition in the game of life.
And some people think that it’s every man for himself and cooperation is for the weak
But the reality is, it’s not Hobbes vs Locke, it’s Hobbes and Locke, humans have the capacity for competition and cooperation.
We evolved in tribes, and being able to compete with other tribes and animals was essential to survive.
It was also essential to be able to cooperate with each other, the survival of your tribe depended on it.
As a result, our imprint for self esteem arose from these conditions.
Self esteem for being a successful competitor who and self esteem for being a good person who helps his people.
And those two pillars are still the foundation of our self esteem, success and goodness.
Success: when you’re being honest, is a competition, and it’s ugly one. When I teach you how to be successful it’s always in comparison to those who aren’t. Or to get client money, you’re competing for that. That attractive girlfriend, you took her off the market away from a lot of guys who would have wanted her. Success is creating win/lose scenarios for your competitors. That first pillar of self esteem, success, is by definition a competition – its defined in contrast to people who aren’t successful. A harsh truth, but a truth nonetheless. And success is something that can’t be faked, it’s defined by external metrics in the world, and all the NLP patterns you run won’t change that reality.
Goodness: Goodness comes from how well you can cooperate with others, or how ethical you are. Goodness is often in opposition to success, but it doesn’t have to be. There are plenty of successful people who play the game fairly and ethically. Even though it’s win/lose, you can still play to win on the field and shake hands after. Goodness like success is also defined by it’s opposite.
You could even extend the pillars from competition/cooperation to success/goodness to material/spiritual…
How successful you are in your worldly mission vs. how kind and consciously evolved you are.
The ideal place to play is in balance.
A purely material person ends up like Jordan Belfort in Wolf Of Wall Street, robbing widows for millions and drowning themselves with drugs, just to get through the day without thinking how much they hate themselves. A purely material life without goodness leads to self hatred. Money cannot buy self worth and self love.
A purely spiritual life on the other hand can make you a lot happier, the happiest man in the world, as measured by his brain waves, is Matthieu Ricard, a buddhist monk who lives in a monastery. Unfortunately most guys, myself included don’t have that kind of discipline. And trying to live a purely spiritual life in the midst of a big city ends in poverty, no dating prospects, and loneliness.
I recommend take the middle path to self esteem by balancing both aspects. That means pursuing success, money and women in an ethical way, but also making time to help others and pursue your spiritual path, to be truly fulfilled you need both.
