The path starts here, with you. You’ll spend your whole life with this person, and there’s nowhere to walk away to. If it’s someone you can’t stand, life turns into hell. If it’s someone you honestly like, the rest sorts itself out. So before anything else, put the oxygen mask on yourself.

There are eight billion people on the planet, and only a handful of them are truly yours: the people you share a road with. You don’t need everyone to love you; finding those few is enough. But that comes later. First the work goes inward.

You must want to spend the rest of your life with yourself first.

And keep your sense of importance inside. The moment your worth moves into someone else’s opinion, you hand them the remote, and they’ll never agree on a verdict anyway. Keep it inside, and there’s nothing to defend: no one can reach what you never hung out on display.

Outgrow yourself first. Then things with everyone else fall into place, and the path opens further.

Integrity

Being solid in yourself rests on integrity. Your thoughts, words and actions match: you think it, say it and do it, with no gap between the three. That’s what being yourself means. There’s no second version quietly living under the first, nothing to hide, no story to keep straight. A person like that has nothing to poke at, because there’s no seam. Almost all the weight people carry is the distance between what they think and what they do. Close it, and everything gets light. When I stopped lying, I also stopped keeping track of what I’d told whom. I stopped being afraid of getting caught. It felt strange at first, but in a good way.

Integrity is easy to test: you act the same in any circumstances. The same person at work, at home and alone in the elevator. And to be the same everywhere, you need true intent at the bottom of it. Even the truth can be framed to paint a different picture, and only intent keeps you from doing it.

Once you’re solid in yourself, people lose their grip on you.

You can’t turn a person in witness-consciousness into a victim by poking at their ego. They’re flexible — they just change their behavior and move on.

All is you

What does it mean to work on yourself?

It means you stop waiting for others to change. That’s the whole turn. Everyone you’ve ever been angry at, every situation you wanted to fix: all that time you were standing with the remote pointed outward, pressing buttons that were never wired to anything.

The world you live in is made up by you. On mushrooms you feel it directly, but you can see it without them. What reaches you is only what your nervous system draws. The people who get under your skin and the events that knock you off course land on layers you hung out there yourself: actions, words, intentions, feelings, all the way down to “I.”

The stubborn man who never bends and defends whatever he said last, just to have the final word, thinks he’s Prometheus. He’s just a fool. The people who are right most often are the ones who change their minds most often. Changing your mind is a skill, and saying “I was wrong” takes more than digging in.

If all of it is you, there’s nobody out there to fix. One move is left, and it points inward. And the first thing you meet on the way in is the body.

Body is a friend

The body is a friend. Feed it right and train it, and it makes joy on its own: from movement, from sex, from a solved problem, from being useful to someone. That’s its everyday work.

The trouble starts when the body gets hooked. Lie down next to a box of sweets or an IV drip of heroin, and the body is happy, no thinking required. But once it depends on something, it gets pushy: it demands sugar, it asks for a cigarette. And the strangest part is that you start wondering whether to have a donut, and it feels like you are the one who wants it. The body runs the mind and makes it find excuses.

It’s like a dog that was meant to guard its owner and grew into a wolf that won’t let him out of the house. Peterson’s dragon that nobody noticed. The body is a friend; just don’t become its prisoner.

So keep it in hand. It’s like driving: there comes a point where you can trust the part of you that drives on its own and let your mind wander. The boots know the road. A trained body becomes that kind of friend, one that carries you.

The state of your body is at least partly your responsibility. That means it’s in your power, and that’s freeing: you can take it wherever you want.

Same with your looks. You can’t fully control them, but you have more say than you think. And investing in yourself can feel very good.

Choose your state

The brain keeps a whole library of states, and one part of it picks which one fits right now. That’s Huberman’s account. So you can pick too: you take the state you need off the shelf.

Worry is an arrow, and it only lands if you believe in it. When you don’t react, don’t grab on and don’t believe anything can hurt you, the arrows stop landing. Your attention is what makes them real.

I know I’m always calm. So when a picture shows up of me not covering the bills, I feel it: it’s all in the body, real for a second. Then I think: alright, interesting, like watching a horror film. Except none of it is here right now. No point burning fuel when the tanks are already low. You worry, then nothing happens, and it turns out you floored the gas for nothing. The energy was tied up, and you could have spent it on something interesting.

Under all of it lies sleep. It’s the foundation: sleep refills the neurotransmitters. Skip it, and the shelf goes empty, with nothing good left to reach for.

Body, state, sleep: that’s the work on yourself, and it never ends. But you don’t have to wait for it to end; the next stop is already open. Time to step outside: that’s where everyone else lives.