The Best Self-Help is Free: Avoiding Futile Endeavors

Chapter 19

This is Chapter 19 of The Best Self-Help is Free, a treatise by Mr. Stolyarov. You can read all chapters of this freely available treatise here.

We humans are creatures of limited abilities. The limits of our abilities can and do expand, of course, and there is no universal law that states that our abilities will never reach certain levels. However, we are still limited at any given moment in time, and our abilities can only expand so quickly. It is essential to take this into account when deciding what projects and endeavors to undertake.

After all, it is much easier to think of a desired state of affairs than to actually enable that state of affairs to come to pass. Furthermore, there are numerous desirable states of affairs that you simply cannot attain, no matter how hard you work, given your present limitations. Having an accurate understanding of what these appealing but currently unattainable goals are is essential to prevent huge amounts of wasted time. Moreover, it is vital to your equanimity and good self-image.

If there is anything I have learned about human self-esteem, it is this. Self-esteem functions according to a positive loop. Successes bolster a person's self-image and inspire him to pursue further accomplishments. Because the person is confident and in control of himself during the pursuit, he is more likely to succeed than if he were distraught and plagued with doubts of an existential, rather than of a practical sort. On the other hand, failures bring down a person's self-image and lead to him to emotionally identify with his own insufficiency. Thus, failures serve to demotivate him from pursuing further ambitious endeavors. Moreover, if he does pursue further endeavors, he will be unsure not only about the practical details of accomplishing his goal - which is reasonable and healthy - but also about his own existential fitness for attaining it.