“The people highest up have the lowest self-esteem.”
Kanye West
“Checking Instagram comments to crowd-source my self-esteem.”
Kanye West
I am an unusually high amount of self-esteem. Where did I get it? How can I increase my self-esteem, and why is this essential?
1. Self-estimate
Self esteem essentially means:
Your own self-estimation and self-assessment of your own personal worth.
How highly do you value yourself? Do you see yourself as superior to others, or inferior to others?
This will totally change how you live your life.
2. Selfishness as a virtue
Modern society teaches us that selfishness is a vice. What if selfishness were our greatest virtue?
If you rate yourself higher than others, then you would certainly be more selfish — only doing things which will benefit you. But isn’t this “evil”? I don’t think so.
Water your own lawn before you water the lawn of others.
Publilius syrus
My theory is this:
Extreme altruism means to be extremely selfish.
By elevating yourself to your own personal maximum (and beyond), then you actually have superfluous power, riches, influence, and energy to help others. It is easy for a giant to help a small human. A small human will have a difficult time helping other (small) humans.
3. Increasing your self-esteem as physiological
I am convinced:
If you want to truly increase your own self-esteem and self-estimate of yourself, first start by transforming your body into that of a Greek God (or Goddess).
From a practical perspective:
- Increase muscle mass (start lifting heavy weights)
- Decrease body fat percentage (10% seems ideal for men, and 20% for women).
- Sleep 8-12 hours a night
This is my theory:
If you are overfat, it probably means you have sub-optimal metabolism. Which sub-optimal metabolism, it will decrease our physiological strength and sense of well-being.
4. Self-esteem isn’t a mental thing.
After poring over the history of philosophy, Stoicism, etc, the bias is this:
If you simply train your mind enough, you can increase your self-esteem and become less afraid.
Also the bias is this:
The mind is more powerful and essential than the body.
Even if you think about science-fiction and nerdy silicon-valley thinking, the notion is that the mind can be separated from the body (uploading your consciousness to the cloud). But what if the “mind” wasn’t real — that only the body was real? And the “mind” was simply an after-the-fact cause from the body?
My theory:
The body is king. The mind is simply the after-the-fact explanation of the physiological state and health of the body.
5. I cannot have high self-esteem if I weighed 1,400 pounds
Let me give an extreme example:
I cannot have a high self-esteem if I weighed 1,400 pounds (Jon Browder Minnoch, real person — record of the heaviest man of all time).
There are certain notions that physique is all subjective. I do agree to a degree– but there are some obvious evolutionary-physiological “objective” perspectives.
For example, which version of Christian Bale looks better?
We can determine from a physiological-biological perspective, Christian Bale (on left) is OBVIOUSLY less fit as a hunter, gatherer, or child-rearer. Christian Bale on the right is far “healthier”– he looks strong, confidence, and is far more attractive and handsome.
I do not want to think about body physiology and physique from a moralistic/ethical perspective. I want to simply see it from a purely scientific perspective:
There are obviously a hierarchy of desirability in terms of physique.
6. In praise of powerlifting
When I was a kid, I was bullied a lot for being a fat kid (I think when I was around 11 years old, I got addicted to Hot Pockets [mom always working] and I think I was around 120 pounds). I still vividly recall having three chins, and having to add baby lube to the bottom of my chins in order to fall asleep to the humid New York nights in the summer.
Anyways, after being sick of called ‘thunder thighs’ and the such, I embarked on a personal quest of self-transformation. At the age of 11, I started to run around Bayside, Queens (my childhood home) for miles. I started doing pushups, crunches. I asked my mom to buy me dumbbell weights, and I started to lift weights religiously. And I started to lose a lot of bodyfat, and increased my muscle mass– which increased my self-confidence and self-esteem by bounds!
In more recent times, I got into powerlifting (attempting new personal records in your “one rep max” for a given lift). I focus on deadlift and squat. When I attempt (or complete) a new PR in any of my lifts, I feel like a demigod afterwards. Why?
7. Everyone should deadlift
When I try a new deadlift PR attempt (for example I deadlifted 415 pounds, sumo style) at the gym yesterday, and this is what happens:
- Before attempting a new PR, you must empty your mind. No fear, no self-doubt. Furthermore, you must hype and pump yourself up. You increase your heart rate. For myself, I take off my headphones (music distracts me), and I walk around the gym and wait until my body feels like it has super-abundant energy to lift. I both slow down my breathing, and yet I try to focus my mind. I stretch my leg muscles and hips, I rotate my wrists, and I start to hype myself up with little mantras like, “Light weight baby [Ronnie Coleman]” or hyping myself by saying “Hercules” [and thinking of the strength and physique of Hercules to hype myself up].
- When attempting the lift, exert 1000% of your effort. I like to do the “power grunt” quite loud before lifting.
- When I am done, my testosterone, hormonal, etc levels are off the fucking Richter.
And this ain’t just for men. Cindy’s PR for deadlift (so far) is an impressive 250 (more than twice her bodyweight). And I can say that after doing a new PR for her deadlift, her self-esteem and self-confidence goes up by 10x.
8. Stop social media and the news
What is the biggest poison to our self-esteem? I am convinced it is social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc), as well as the media (blogs, TV shows, newspapers, magazines, etc).
Why? Social media quantifies your self-esteem and your self-worth. For example:
- Sunday: You get 25 like’s on a photograph [baseline]
- Monday: You get 100 like’s on a photograph [happy]
- Tuesday: You get 50 like’s on a photograph [depressed]
Of course on Monday you will will feel happier and more joyful, because you see a 4x gain in terms of likes (25 likes to 100 likes). But on Tuesday you will feel depressed, because your 100 likes has now decreased 2x into only 50 like’s.
9. Self-esteem is relative.
But this is the funny thing:
Assuming you skipped Monday, you would feel happier on Tuesday:
- Sunday: You get 25 like’s on a photograph [baseline]
- Tuesday: You get 50 like’s on a photograph [happy]
Now in this circumstance, you see the 2x gain from Sunday to Tuesday (25->50 likes). You feel happier because you see the gain!
But anyways what happens?
You get tied to a certain like number, and that becomes your new baseline for happiness.
And what is bad about self-quantification via likes? The number of likes you get is out of your control, it depends on the “Newsfeed Algorithm” of Facebook (who owns Instagram). It factors:
- Time of day you post
- How frequently (or infrequently) you posted in the past
- The type of content it is (whether a photo, video, pure text, or a link)
Whenever anyone tells me that the number of likes they get doesn’t affect or influence them, I am highly suspicious. If one day you had 10,000 likes on a photo and the next day you get “only” 1,000 likes, certainly you will feel like shit? Or certainly this information would change how you perceive your photograph.
Then what happens? We become subconsciously programmed to try to optimize our like number. We end up self-programming ourselves concurrently with the Facebook/Instagram algorithm.
And the question comes:
Do you want an algorithm or foreign entity affecting/influencing your self-esteem?
I think not.
Delete the gram. Uninstall Facebook and all social media apps from your phone.
Remove all the toxicity from your life (this includes toxic people).
10. Don’t waste your energy arguing, fighting, or defending yourself from other people
Nietzsche says this wisely in ‘Ecce Homo‘:
You have a limited amount of energy and strength in a day. Even having to defend yourself against the pettiness of others will exhaust your strength.
This is why after a stressful day at work, you are totally drained. You cannot motivate yourself to make art or do anything. Not because you lack ‘willpower’ — it is because your physiological energy is literally depleted. The problem isn’t you or your weakness of will; the problem is your job!
11. Strengthening isolation
In order to build your self-esteem, you need radical periods of self-recovery and self-strengthening. For myself my best period of building my self-esteem was radically cutting myself out from the outside world. No email, no phone, no way to contact me. It was like my Batman moment [Batman Beings] of going to the mountains, and training and building myself.
I love society, but society can also fuck up your self-esteem. Society wants you to be an obedient herd-animal. Society doesn’t want you to be exceptional.
Society slowly chips away at your self-esteem. Society says:
You must self-sacrifice yourself for the benefit of others.
And the root of this thinking is this:
You are insignificant compared to the herd. You are not worth much.
If your goal is to maximize your own self-esteem, be extremely cautious the people you interact with in society. The simple idea:
Ruthlessly prune away toxic and negative people from your life. Only keep those in your inner-circle who genuinely want what is best FOR YOU (not for themselves).
Similarly, only have friends who you want what is best for them [not for yourself]. It is essentially a society of “inter-pares” (equals) in which everyone can stand alone as an individual, but they can still empower one another to new heights.
Conclusion: Make yourself great.
Life is more fun when you have an over-sized ego. Ego is good.
Ryan Holiday says “The Ego is the Enemy“. I disagree. The ego is your greatest commander, and the wisest self-counselor.
When others say you have an “over-sized ego” they are essentially saying:
How dare you think you are superior to others, and myself!
Christian morality wants to make us small. Asian-Confucian culture also wants to make us small.
We must break away, and self-aggrandize ourselves to the maximum.
ERIC