Inconvenient Truths About Life Most Self-Improvement Influencers Won’t Tell You

I'm not afraid

Photo by Altin Ferreira on Unsplash (Cold Shower Bro)

“On your last day on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.” — Anonymous

I’m a stupid self-improvement influencer.

I should plead innocent. But I can’t. I’ve written about self-help for 10 years. I’ve even written cheesy pieces about why you should wake up at 4am.

I was the poster boy for self-help until recently. And that’s why you should listen to me. Because what I’ve learned is most of this life advice is useless.

These influencers are trying to inflate their egos, not help you. By being deep in the self-help space, I’ve seen behind the closed doors. And it’s ugly.

Here are the inconvenient truths about life no influencer or guru says.

Life is supposed to be an overwhelming struggle

Influencers sell the opposite dream.

They want you to believe life can be easy. Take a look at Instagram. Every second user is saying “Hey, my life is great, look at me.” It’s bullsh*t.

Behind the pina coladas and overseas holidays, most of these selfie-obsessed weirdos are a nervous wreck. They don’t know what the meaning of life is.

20 year olds need this message more than anyone else: life is meant to be a struggle.

You’re supposed to feel like your boss hates you.
You’re supposed to hate applying for 100s of jobs and never hearing back.
You’re supposed to hate that the cost of living is out of control.
You’re supposed to find marriage hard (looking at you Timbo!). 
You’re supposed to struggle to raise kids.

Everything you love in life will get lost multiple times.

The things you love will die…but they’ll be reborn.

The stuff we value in life is the stuff we struggled for. Life is worth nothing without struggles. Life has to break your heart for it to mean something.

Now jam that up your ass 20-somethings and go cry about it on TikTok in some confessional video. Sorry not sorry.

Let life break you.

The traditional rules are supposed to be broken

A guy keeps emailing me.

He wants to get paid to edit my writing. He sent me a sample of him editing one of my essays. He cleaned up all the grammar issues. He removed the bad words. He sanitized my writing. He sprayed disinfectant on it and wore gloves while editing it.

This guy made me sound as exciting as a 9-5 guy crossing the road to go to work at the same analyst job after 40 years.

Using proper grammar makes writers sound boring. And having someone else edit your writing will likely remove your writer’s voice. The theme here is that following grammar rules – or any rules – is overrated.

It’s how you sound like everyone else. It’s how you follow tried-and-tested career paths off a cliff, instead of the uncommon paths that lead to the real pots of gold.

Everyone wants you to follow “the rules” so they can feel good about themselves. So they can make you conform and feel better about the bad decisions they’ve made.

Don’t do it. Lawfully break the rules. Take a piss all over ‘em (like that grammar nazi?).

No company is your family

I worked in many “we are family” companies.

It was code for “you must work long hours and go everywhere with us, including to the pub after work.” I believed the lie, don’t worry.

Then the 2020 bat virus that shut the world down happened. The same HR puppets and big bosses screaming “we are family” went silent. Layoffs began. The company had to save money despite the billions in revenue and 280,000 employees.

The record performance from the year prior was forgotten. The coding superstars who pulled all-nighters were suddenly being exited.

I got lucky.

I didn’t get fired but I missed out on the usual inflation-adjusted salary increase. Bonuses were blown to smithereens by middle managers trying to look good to the revenue gods.

You know who suffered while I worked that job?

My real family.

My wife, parents, and in-laws. I barely saw them. I came home late, said “Honey I’m home,” then went to bed exhausted. It’s a miracle my real family forgave me.

A company isn’t your family. If a recession hits there’s a good chance you will be laid off. Just go ask all the google employees who thought they were kings of Silicon Valley and are now unemployed.

The layoff trend has got worse, not better.

There’s no need to cry into your Snoopy t-shirt though. This is great news. Now you know where you stand with an employer. You’re a gun for hire. No worries, mate.

So work on you. Choose yourself. Build something after hours. Stack multiple income streams. Just don’t be a dumb-dumb and fall for company loyalty.

Complaining gets you nowhere. Do this instead…

The world is full of complainers because it’s easy.

The persuasion paradox says, “The most argumentative people rarely persuade anyone of anything.” I’m sure you can relate.

The little social justice warriors and protestors never create change. They just scream and shout through megaphones while the crowd around them party and pump music.

Instead of complain and blame, the solution is to just move on. Make a new decision.

Labels make you a baby

This one’s controversial. Hear me out.

Most labels (not all) just limit you. I was chatting to a writer yesterday. “I can’t write for 28 days online because I have asperger's.”

Okay.

In 2010 I was diagnosed with asperger's too. It felt freeing. Finally an explanation as to why my life was f*cked. Two years later the same therapist said “you don’t have aspergers anymore.”

What the hell happened?

I got my life together and stopped blaming labels. I wasn’t socially awkward. I was a drunk. A bum. A failure. I had an excuse for everything.

I’m not saying every label is useless, but a lot of them are.

People love labels because it let’s them outsource their failures to an unknown source that can’t be held accountable. I sure as hell couldn’t ring up Mr Asperger's and say “Yo, it’s Timmy boy from Australia. Thanks for ya help, man.”

• Are these labels you live by really helping?

• Can a label empower as well as disempower?

• Can a label be reversed?

Labels that create excuses are a prison. Personal responsibility is the real freedom.

Money problems don’t get better unless you do

Money problems piss me off.

They’re a blinking red siren to make a change. A potential customer said to me on Sunday, “I don’t have $200 right now to learn this skill.”

Let’s unpack what that means. Okay, so you don’t have $200. Fair enough. What happens tomorrow if you have to go to hospital for urgent medical treatment and the out of pocket cost after insurance is $2000?

You say no. So you die?

The amount of times I hear this story scares me. If savings are so bad that $200 is going to throw you off course financially, I’m not here to shame you or make fun of you. But you can’t stay living like that.

Money problems don’t resolve themselves.

You don’t ride out the financial storm and wait for the rain to stop. No. You must make a change. The answer is more money. Don’t make life harder than it is.

More money comes from upgrading your skills.

The secret “main character syndrome” is real

In every video game or movie there’s a main character.

Then there are hundreds or even thousands of NPCs (non-player characters). People who play small parts. Background characters we forget. Or even just random extras.

Blogger Alex Becker taught me that too many people think they’re the main character. They go into every situation thinking the whole world is watching them. That one little slip-up could ruin their life. Or that embarrassment is a curse.

But we’re not thinking about you.

I’m nursing a 1 year old kid as I write this. I’ve got bills to pay. Family members have health problems. I’m running late for a doctor’s appointment. My wife wants me to pick up some vegetables for dinner. So…no…sorry but I’m not thinking about you as much as you think. Neither is anyone else.

It gets worse.

In movies, the main character usually follows some storytelling framework like “the hero’s journey.”

They’re living. Problem happens. There are setbacks. They try. They fail. Then some cool left-of-center event happens and they’re saved. They become Rocky Balboa or win the women’s rights movement and write a $50m book about it.

Because we all watch far too many movies and TV shows, we’ve been conditioned to think we are these same main characters. That if we’re just patient enough, then we’ll have our hero moment and everyone will give us a standing ovation.

But no adventure happens.

Nothing changes in your life. The mission or calling never finds you. People move on. You stay a background character for eternity. You slowly become more irrelevant while waiting.

There’s no secret plot for your life. There isn’t some higher power with a special plan.

So what Alex taught me is you’ve got to go chase the adventure yourself. Stop waiting. Start taking risks and discovering new opportunities.

Being smart is often a curse

The self-improvement influencers love to give us hacks, strategies, Elon Musk morning routines, and complex systems.

It sounds alluring, especially to smart people.

But the problem with being smart is you often take simple things and make them complex. It strokes your ego because you think the complexity makes the goal harder, and therefore, you’re special for having access to the secret tips and tricks.

What no self-help guru will tell you is life is simple:

• Do the hard work.

• Show up every day.

• Treat people with respect.

• Iterate and experiment as much as possible.

• Be patient and stick to a goal for 5+ years.

• There are no shortcuts.

That’s everything you need to know about self-improvement – and all of it is obvious. Yet most people don’t do it because they fall victim to their own intelligence.

Never outsmart yourself – Sahil Bloom

Change starts here

The foundation of self-improvement is change.

If you want new or better results, then you must change. Dare I say it, transform. Change is hard. It hurts. It’s a struggle.

To change we have to take action, and we need a plan. The average person doesn’t. They know they need to change but they don’t know how.

They rely on hope. Or they delay the change to the mythical “someday.” Without a strategy for change you keep getting the same results.

So change isn’t hard to understand.

If you don’t change nothing new will happen. If you don’t know how to change then that’ll be true until you get help with the change.

In that sense, our future is easy to predict.

Work-life balance is a nightmare that can destroy your life

Wild thing to say, right?

Work-life balance is all about slowing down, taking a load off, and rewarding yourself for whatever you did this week.

No one wants to hear this…

The most successful people in the world don’t have work-life balance – only mediocre people do.

If you want to be average then that’s fine – but you won’t achieve meaningful success or become a high performer by working 2 hours a day and drowning in self-care.

When you put a lot of effort into a goal it makes the goal look effortless. It never is.

Big results happen because of unwavering effort. And it takes more effort to achieve big goals than people realize. The top 1% have work-life imbalance. They’re obsessed. All they think about is their goal.

When they go on holidays they can’t switch off.

For some, this sounds glorious. For others, this sounds like a nightmare. I’m not here to tell you what you want to hear. If you want to be wildly successful, then you won’t have a work-life balance. Make your decision accordingly.

What’s an inconvenient truth you think we need to hear? Let me know in the comments.

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