“There’s a particular self-development paradox I’ve consistently encountered, but haven’t managed to get a handle on, and it is this:

Whatever the Journey you’re on, it will kill you, over and over. Self-development is truly, in the Palahnuik sense, self-destruction. That is the paradox.

Of course, I don’t mean this in the literal sense. With any luck, you won’t die from trying to master something, or improve any aspect of your life.

What I mean is this: That when you set out to achieve or master something, you will be forced to revise your expectations, your approach, your whole inner orientation, to the extent that the person you will have to be, in order to get the result you want, will almost surely be entirely different.

Which is an interesting observation to me, because whenever we project goals in the future, we do so on with the underlying assumption that we would attain whatever it is we seek, while staying the same person. This probably cannot be helped. How can we possibly project outside of our present framework?

We have certain expectations – perhaps we imagine the prestige our skills and achievements would get us, perhaps it is merely the psychological permission to give ourselves a pat in the back, for proving something to ourselves, or to an imagined ‘other’. These are the carrots at the end of the stick that drive us outside the doors of our comfort zone, into the unknowns, with their peaks, valleys, and, of course, the plateaus.

But when peak is followed by an unexpected valley, and we are forced back to the drawing boards, forced to revise our expectations of ourselves, and our approach, our inner orientation towards our journey undergoes an inevitable change.

Perhaps we no longer proceed with that same reckless confidence and optimism in consistent progress. We stop talking about our goals to others, because there is now a silver of doubt regarding our goal. We have just received the first flurry of punches from the journey, and our ego is reeling from the pain.

At this point, I suppose I could let my ego limp back into back into my comfort zone, and close the door to that particular avenue of change. Likely rationalizations include “This is not worth the effort” or “This was not what I expected, and if it is not what I expected, then fuck it”.

The option to give up is open, all the time. And this option won’t stop being tempting to the ego because the longer you walk the journey of mastery the more punches you will receive. Before long, you learn to avoid some predictable punches from the journey. Not by dodging them, no. You learn to avoid punches by making your ego ever more smaller. You expect less. You focus on the process, and not on the outcome. You remind yourself of why you love what it is that you do, instead of what you might receive from the journey. The focus on acquisition gives way to the love of the process. You let go of petty time-frames and stop grasping after instantly gratifying results.

The journey is merciless. You’d think it is the valleys that would hurt the most – the low periods where your illusion of competence is wrecked, but no.

The most grueling and dangerous periods are the plateaus – those seemingly never-ending periods where you seem to be making no progress at all despite putting in the hours, putting in the work. You start to doubt yourself, doubt your approach. You are stupid for even attempting. You’ll always be mediocre at what it is you want to master. The people who have the skills you want, who are in the place of life that you want to be, seem to be from a different realm, on a separate league, and they’re mocking you for being a sucker, in thinking you have what it takes.

I suppose, based on my psychological deduction, that its easiest to give up while on a plateau, to walk in circles while convincing oneself that one is moving somewhere else.

Some people do that – you know the type: the kind that’s always talking bombastically about one new goal, one final piece of the puzzle that would ‘fix’ them, that would be the game-changer. Fast-forward a few months, and it’s a new goal, a new magic-key… like a hamster running on a wheel in place.

Then another response to plateaus would be to tuck one’s head down and walk forward blindly, as if in a coma. Read only what your curriculum gives you. Base your criterion on success on the bare minimum – enter a trance in which the energy you expend is directed towards merely ‘getting by’, and watch as your (figurative) muscles begin to atrophy, and one day, when it really counts, find out that you cannot sprint anymore, you cannot move meaningfully anymore.

But if you sidestep these two pitfalls, and walk forward, having faith that eventually, somehow, you will break out of this plateau, your ego will die. It will fucking die. At some point the pain of walking the journey with eyes fully open becomes too much to bear, and the ego simply goes ‘You’re on your own now, bro”.

Every step becomes meaningless, yet charged with purpose. You no longer have an ‘ultimate’ aim, you just have a direction, and you keep walking. Where the journey used to throw a punch at the ego, now it punches empty air.

Ego drives us out the door, but it is ego that must die on the journey it starts. That is the paradox.

If we choose to walk the journey, eventually ego has to leave the game, and there will be nothing there anymore.

Now we can make progress.”

– Xavier Koh