Sometimes it is challenging seeing everyone you look up to seem to have this unshakeable faith and conviction in themselves. Kanye. Steve Jobs. Elon. A$AP Rocky. And when you feel like you don’t have that, you wonder if you can actually become anything like the people you look up to.

This makes low self-esteem such a dangerous loop to be caught up in. It self-perpetuates and latches onto any thought that may feed its growth. It’s an epidemic far worse than COVID that not only is impacting almost every individual, but totally shifting the cultural zeitgeist towards one of fear, cynicism, and lack of hope. What does a group of people do when they don’t feel like they have any ability to make their future better for themselves?

Such a loop is captured in the New Testament:

"For to everyone who has shall more be given, and he shall have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away.”

I have had low self-esteem for most of my life. Maybe it’s the result of being an immigrant. Maybe it’s because I move around from school to school, state to state, and country to country for a large part of my childhood. Getting incredibly sensitive to how people felt about me. Never totally feeling like I belong. Genuinely caring about what people thought of me.

I still think what started to crack this cycle for me was being rejected by the path I previously thought was the path to high self-esteem. One in which one gets a prestigious job, impresses their peers and gets a salary that makes their parents proud. I suppose there was always an option to go down perhaps a similar path, but slightly less, but I’ve felt from a very young age that I was destined to do something great. So exploring a path to having faith in myself felt like the only option.

That was almost 6 years ago now. Over those 6 years I’ve had dope jobs, quit them, failed at my own thing, rejected often, and a whole barrage of rollercoasters. I genuinely don’t think it was until this year that I was finally able to start cracking the code to a higher view of myself. Friends were a big part of it. Tim Draper's belief in me changed my life. So was anime. Kanye made a huge difference. But it wasn’t until I was able to intimately invite religion into my life that I was able to make any progress. Though diving deep into religion will have to be some other post.

It never really occurred to me how insidious low-self esteem can be and how programmed it can be into us. Bullying in school, competitive standardized tests, comparative grades, “career” counseling, professional organizations. It’s insane how much of the systems built around us are made to keep us down.

Not only does this affect us from a career perspective, but also from a love perspective. If you’ve read my writing in the past, I think about love a lot. It’s the most important thing in the world. Yet it’s always been something that’s been jjjuuuussssttttt out of grasp for me. So much of it is that we teach ourselves that we are unlovable. We aren’t as blond as that guy. Not as ripped. Not as rich. Not as attractive. It’s all consumerist manufactured bullshit. It leads to us self-sabotaging ourselves with others that actually do care about us.

For those of us that struggle with persistent low self-esteem, the way we break out is by believing deeply in other things first. Believing in God for we are made in the image of him. Believing in each other for we are all divine. The energy we put out into the world then gets reflected back at us and we slowly begin to have faith in ourselves.

I don’t know what it is like to have persistent high self-esteem and confidence. I would bet that it isn’t a permanent state either. So breaking out of it is a constant struggle.

In The War of Art:

“Fear doesn't go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”

Let’s affirm ourselves. When I call myself a visionary or a genius or compare myself with the heroes I listed above, it is me fighting the labels that society wants to put on US. Not just me. We’re all visionaries and geniuses with our power chained by the matrix. We will be liberated. Everything I do and build in my life will be centered around liberating people to feel complete in the pursuit of happiness.

My team at Holon will have to deal with a leader that has low-self esteem for a little bit. But I will work on it and learn how to develop faith and confidence. We will achieve our dreams.

FOR THE DREAMS OF THE PEOPLE NEVER DIE.

This post is a part of a sequence of smaller articles I will be writing around ideas I have every day. They will not be as polished. Please forgive any typos and errors!

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