The Psychology of Self-Sabotage! | Robert Greene

Channel: Bold Fella
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y517SU6gvu8

A montage of Robert Greene interview clips on becoming your own critic and how your attitude can sabotage you. (Re-titled compiled footage; his framework, not cited research.)

Key points

• Think of yourself as a builder/craftsman: any project (a business, a book) needs a solid, symmetrical foundation - a "very human" mindset.
• The core skill is becoming your own critic: while working you lose distance and think everything is golden (or all terrible). Others may not know enough or have an axe to grind, so develop an inner "outsider" voice that says "this isn't working" and pushes revision.
• Don't go so far you never finish - accept 95% and done; and the goal is constructive improvement, not beating yourself up. Once something is published/out there, criticizing it is pointless (do a forward-looking "post-mortem" instead).
• You must love and feel excitement for the work itself; detachment at key moments is the powerful skill.
• Attitude has a single dominant component (e.g. anxious, insecure, open). It goes out non-verbally and others respond to it, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy - anxiety breeds situations that feed your anxiety. (Cites the teacher-expectation effect: belief in students raises their performance.)
• Attitude is partly genetic/innate but plastic: you cannot become a different person, but an anxious person can become less anxious by taking small steps outside the comfort zone (e.g. talk to a stranger).
• Observe yourself in real interactions (a new person, a foreign city, criticism) to read your true attitude. Greene shares an editor telling him at 24 he was "not writer material" - painful, but partly true, and it redirected him away from journalism.