Be Yourself

How can I motivate myself and feel less miserable?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Sometimes I cry inside myself that I’m not like other intelligent people in my school and it hurts me every single day. I want to do my best but it just feels hard and my motivation dies off quickly. How can I motivate myself and feel less miserable?”

You joined Quora about three years ago and appear to have only two questions, including this one. The other question is about the lack of support and apparent abuse you endure from your parents.

It seems you are dealing with some intense emotional struggles that you do not deserve. However you perform in your academics and to improve yourself and achieve your goals, your parents have a moral obligation to be supportive.

Since they are not, you get saddled with the doubly hard challenge of finding your way through life’s confusing mess.

It’s not fair to you, but it may help you to understand how utterly broken most of the world is. We live in a world where a whopping majority (70%-80%) of families are dysfunctional.

You are not alone.

You can overcome your challenges.

A few things to consider while struggling to make something worthwhile of your life include;

  1. Focus on doing what you love doing. By investing your energies into something that brings you joy, you can create successes that will help you develop the confidence and motivation to succeed in other areas of your life.
  2. Find people who can empathize with your struggles — mainly because they endure similar struggles. Develop friendships with them to experience the emotional support your parents cannot give you.
  3. Read and read a lot to experience life through different eyes and learn to understand the complexities of life and its struggles through perspectives different from your own. Learn from what other minds have to teach you, and you will find strength within that you cannot feel now.
  4. Get a pet, if you can — a dog or a cat that can fill your heart with unconditional love and give you a reason to carry on through your toughest challenges.
  5. Spend as much time as you can with nature to feel that you belong here and to something much greater than the box of sorrow you have been given to bear.
  6. Know that nothing matters more than your ability to grow and change and adapt to an increasingly chaotic world undergoing a dramatic change that is pushing all of us to our limits. If we can survive this period of change, we will find a much friendlier world awaiting us on the other side of these challenges.
  7. Believe in yourself even when you make mistakes. Indeed, feel good about recognizing your mistakes because they are lessons you have succeeded in learning. It is much worse to make mistakes without identifying them as mistakes. It means you will repeat them like banging your head against a wall and hurting yourself even more.
  8. Allow yourself to see your parents as human beings like all other human beings. All of us have been damaged in some form or another by life, and it is a consequence of having undergone generations of struggle to emerge from a darkness of barbarism.
  9. Whatever you do, if you approach it with honesty, you are doing your best. You don’t have to try to do your best. You will always do your best if you are honest with yourself about what you do. Expect nothing more from yourself than complete honesty because knowing yourself matters most in your life. Knowing yourself is where you will find the strength to endure all the many challenges your life has in store.

I wish you all the best in your journey through this madness called “life.”

Temet Nosce

How do I cope with not being good enough?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How do I cope with life knowing I am not good enough to do what I want?”

Life is about learning to cope.

One goes about coping by not obsessing over what one cannot do but by finding joy in what one can do.

There is no “good enough” because that’s an illusion that limits your potential and destroys your capacity for finding joy in doing something meaningful for yourself.

When you think about it, being “good enough” is a metric others apply toward you. You can choose to either accept other people’s insulting views of you, learn to internalize them and begin feeding a growing suicidal ideation, or you can stand up and say, “Fuck you.”

Almost everyone who has done something special has faced people who judge them as “not good enough.”

You can either accept the judgment of people who will never know “the real you” that you know lives within, or you can assert “that real you hidden inside” and embody it to become the “real you” that you know exists and is bursting to have a life of its own free from judgmental assholes.

Here’s a secret most don’t understand: Whenever someone judges you as not good enough, they confess to their insecurities that they are too afraid of not being good enough. So they project them onto people they can victimize. It’s an expression of a mentality called “crab psychology” — if they can’t be good enough, they will do what they can to ensure you’re not good enough.

Whatever you do with your life, don’t become one of those assholes. Be sure to encourage people to be their best because that’s the only way we’ll be able to crawl out of this hole of primitive barbarism that we’re still trapped in.

Temet Nosce