Read This And Get Pissed At yourself

Read time: 6 minutes

Hey, welcome back.

Last week, we talked about why refusing to suffer actually leads to more suffering. You can read that (and all past issues, here)​

Today, I want to weigh on your mind about one thing:

You already know the thing

Look, I hate to be the one to tell you this. And you've probably read some version of it four times this month already, somewhere between a LinkedIn carousel and an infographic with a nice gradient on it.

But at some point you have to start keeping the promises you make to yourself.

I mean the specific one you thought of just then. It arrived about six words into that sentence.

Maybe it's the note in your phone from last March that you still open occasionally and then close. Or the message you've drafted and deleted enough times that the drafting has started to feel like it counts. Or the conversation you keep deciding to have once this busy period ends, and the busy period has now been ending since roughly last summer.

And you've got a reason. That's what I want to talk about, because I'd put money on your reason being correct.

Mine were correct too

I could tell you exactly why I wasn't doing things. Where the fear came from, which parts of my life put it there, how it showed up when the pressure went up. I had the whole thing mapped and I could talk about it well.

The accuracy was the problem. If I'd been lying to myself I might have caught it earlier. But everything I said was true, and true things are very hard to argue with, particularly when you're the one saying them and there's nobody else in the room.

What it took to shift it

Then Grabble fell apart and I burnt out properly. I stopped sleeping. Not the tired but functioning version, months of lying there. And I had beautiful language for the whole thing. I could have delivered a talk on my own condition while remaining completely unable to do anything about it.

What eventually shifted it wasn't insight. I went and saw a dietitian, changed what I was actually eating, and started sleeping again.

That's the turn. The whole thing.

Which was quite annoying, if I'm honest. Years of understanding myself in high definition, and the thing that moved was a boring practical change I'd been putting off because it seemed far too small to be the answer to something that felt that big.

Heights exists because of what I found in that period. But I only found it because I did something instead of thinking about it more carefully.

The part that took me longest to admit

The reason I'm telling you that is because of what all the self-analysis felt like at the time, which was humility. It has the shape of humility. You're looking honestly at your own faults, which is supposedly the hard thing.

But look at where the hours went. All of them into me. My patterns, my recovery, my extremely well-understood reasons. I did an enormous amount of thinking about myself and filed it under work, and I'd have argued with anyone who suggested otherwise.

Before you reply to tell me off

If you're dealing with something clinical then none of this is pointed at you. Depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD, ADHD. Understanding what's happening isn't a detour around the treatment there, it is the treatment, and I work in brain health so I'm the last person who's going to tell you your brain is a discipline issue.

I'm talking to the rest of us. No diagnosis, full vocabulary, nothing actually moving.

How to tell which one you are

The way I test it now is time. Saying you need to sit with something is fair enough and usually true for about four days. If you've been sitting with it since spring then something else is going on, and you'll know, because of the small hit of relief you get every time you say it out loud to someone.

Do a fraction of it this week

Genuinely a fraction:

• Take the thing you've been explaining your way out of. Not the enormous one, the medium one you've had a good reason to postpone since about June
• Write down the smallest version that still counts as having done it. If it takes longer than twenty minutes it's still too big
• Put a date on it that another human being can see, so the diary does the work your motivation isn't doing
• Do it before Sunday, badly, feeling exactly as unready as you do right now
• Write one line afterwards about what actually happened, not what you learned. Just what happened

That last one matters more than it looks. The gap between what you expected and what you got is the only thing that's ever properly changed my mind about myself.

Dan

P.S. Someone once told me I was the most self-aware person they'd ever met who hadn't changed a thing in two years. I was quite pleased with the first half of that sentence for about a week before the second half caught up with me. If it just caught up with you too, good. Do the thing.

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A 2020 study published in Emotion found that people who learned to accept their “non-ideal emotional states”, including low motivation, low energy, and neutral days, experienced significantly higher overall well-being and lower stress. ​ The key insight: self-acceptance amplifies emotional resilience, while self-judgment weakens it. 📌 Quick Takeaway → Your average days aren’t failures; they’re emotional training grounds. When you stop punishing yourself for being human, everything in your life compounds faster. ​→ Link to study​

In my goal to help more entrepreneurs/people who are looking to level up their careers, I've just started taking 1-1 consulting calls (only 1 a week) Why book a call? Some of my expertise/success: I've built 6 startups. 3 fails, 1 win, and 2 still going. E-Commerce: Heights - with revenue over $40M a year. Community: Foundrs, one of the UK's top founder communities Podcasting: Leaders Media - Bootstrapped to #1 in business and 10M downloads​ Health/Mental Health: Overcame depression, insomnia, burnout and anxiety in pursuit of success​ Angel Investing: I've invested in over 100 companies Personal Brand: Over 400,000 followers across social Hear me on Diary of A CEO with Steven Bartlett​ So if you're interested in booking a session with me to talk all things business or building a personal brand, book for 30-minutes or 45-minutes. (limited spots). Book a Call with Dan

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