I am writing this as a reminder to myself that I just want to be happy in life.
When I first started to get into the self-help and self improvement territory many years ago, I was in a place where there was a lot of resentment, jealousy and negativity in me. At the time, I just wanted to be happier and less negative . The thing with self help is that there are almost infinite ways and areas you can improve your life. You can be really focused in one thing (for example your career) and this takes you over, and you become so short-sighted that you lost track of your ultimate goal.
This is what happened to me over, and over and over again. As I get caught up with maximizing my productivity, my career, becoming fitter and a better version of myself, I took things way too seriously. Here I am, time and again, feeling jealous, resentful, and negative because I tried too hard to improve.
You see, with self-actualization, it's really easy to fool yourself into believing that you are doing the right thing, until you realize how unhappy you have been, and how mean you have been to yourself.
As with me, I started my YouTube channel as a way to unleash my creativity and to make videos that can hopefully inspire and motivate other people. I do want to become a successful YouTuber and a natural way to measure that is to use the metrics YouTube shows us: the number of subscribers, views, comments. Unfortunately, those numbers are by and large out of my control. The worst thing I can probably do is to let those numbers dictate my happiness and my actions. But that's exactly what I did. I think I pulled the brakes on it before it got too out of control because I realized how hypocritical and ironic it would be that Im creating contents to inspire others, yet I make myself so neurotic and miserable during the process. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Ive also come to realize that to be happy is proportional to how much love you can give yourself. This is something that many people are depriving themselves of, and not out of choice. Growing up, we all learnt ways to blame ourselves, beat ourselves up, and heck even hate ourselves. Yet not many people are told to love ourselves. I have definitely been way too mean to myself for absolutely no good reason. And if I ask myself today, what is my ultimate goal in life, the answer would be to be happy and kind to myself. so I just want to remind myself again that this is where I want to be. Its time to turn things around and start learning how to love myself.
I want to write and create videos because they make me happy. I want to improve myself, only because it'd make me a kinder and happier person. And only as a result of manifesting love and happiness, can I then inspire and motivate others. Everyone's life and resources are different. There really is no point to compare myself with anyone else, even less so to compare numbers.
Its ok to not make 2 videos and read a book every single week.
I want to end with this question: if you don't love yourself, how can you be happy and ever love other people?