10. Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It - Kamal Ravikant (📱)

Rating 9/10

Reading Notes:

James Altucher, “I don’t do a post now unless I’m worried about what people will think about me.”

Meditation is a practice. Working out is a practice. Loving yourself, perhaps the most important of all, is a practice.

I once heard someone explain thoughts as this: we, as human beings, think that we’re thinking. Not true. Most of the time, we’re remembering. We’re re-living memories. We’re running familiar patterns and loops in our head. For happiness, for procrastination, for sadness. Fears, hopes, dreams, desires. We have loops for everything.

If you had a thought once, it has no power over you. Repeat it again and again, especially with emotional intensity, feeling it, and over time, you’re creating the grooves, the mental river. Then it controls you.

I would just return to the one true return to the one true thing in my head, “I love myself, I love myself, I love myself.”

This question is deceptively simple in its power. It gently shifts your focus from wherever you are - whether it’s anger or pain or fear, any form of darkness - to where you want to be. And that is love. You mind and life have no choice but to follow.

And here’s the interesting part. When we love ourselves, we naturally shine, we are naturally beautiful. And that draws others to us. Before we know it, they’re loving us and it’s up to us to choose who to share our love with.

Beautiful irony. Fall in love with yourself. Let your love express itself and the world will beat a path to your door to fall in love with you.

The mind, left to itself, repeats the same stories, the same loops. Mostly ones that don’t serve us. So what’s practical, what’s transformative, is to consciously choose a thought. Then practice it again and again. With emotion, with feeling, with acceptance.

The key, at least for me, has been to let go. Let go of the ego, let go of attachments, let go of who I think I should be, who others think I should be. And as I do that, the real me emerges, far far better than the Kamal I projected to the world.

There is a strength in this vulnerability that cannot be described, only experienced.

Whenever I notice fear in my mind, instead of pushing it aside or using it as fuel, I say to myself, “it’s ok.” A gentle yes to myself. To the moment, to what the mind is feeling. Often, that is enough to deflate the fear. From there, I shift to the truth of loving myself.

That is the beauty of learning, and then sharing. You grow. You share the lessons and help others grow. Here’s the magic - they, in turn, make you grow. It’s a natural cycle.