Truth Bomb Tuesday: Don’t sell yourself out. It’s never worth it.
As a celebrity investor, there is one trade I warn all my students about.
It’s a guaranteed misery trade.
What is it?
Selling your soul to the devil.
Now I’m not talking about the actual devil here. What you choose to do with your immortal soul is up to you. I’m not judging.
What I’m talking about here is selling yourself out. Betraying your own truth. Making yourself small so others don’t feel insecure around you.
Whatever language you want to put around it. The idea is the same.
Often if feels like life asks us to live a smaller version of ourselves, or to live according to someone else’s values, just to get by.
I’ve done it. We’ve all done it.
Now, I’m serious when I say talk about this as an investment. I actually think it helps draw out what’s going on here.
In every investment there is the outlay – the expense – and the return.
Selling yourself out is a terrible investment for two reasons.
First, it’s horribly expensive.
When we’re living a smaller version of ourselves or according to someone else’s values, we are out of our integrity.
Being out of your integrity for any length of time is incredibly expensive. It’s painful. It eats away at our souls. That’s not what we’re here for.
So that’s one.
The second reason that it’s a terrible investment is that the returns are garbage.
What do you get for the hefty price you paid? To coddle other people in their insecurities? A safer emotional environment where everything is swept under the carpet? A job doing something you hate?
Tell me any of that’s worth the ticket price.
When we stop and look at it, we realise it’s a terrible investment, but it’s a felt truth for us already.
That’s why the end of this investment period often ends in a blow up.
For example, you’re playing it small so your partner doesn’t feel insecure and to help things run smoother around the house.
It doesn’t work, they still feel insecure, and you feel like you’ve paid an incredible price for nothing.
Boom.
Or you did what your parents wanted to and became a lawyer.
One day, your partner asks you to chip in a couple of hundred K for a new office and you’re like, “What?! I never wanted to be a lawyer anyway.”
And so you put a hammer through the windscreen of their Merc.
(Not speaking from experience here.)
The point is that you and you’re soul are the most precious and the most valuable thing you have. When you sell yourself out you are betraying yourself for just a handful of silver. It is never worth the price.
And you know that. That truth lives in the body.
And it’s only waiting for a chance to explode.
So come back into yourself and come back into your integrity.
Come back in a way of being where what you believe is in perfect alignment with what you do.
This can be expensive too.
But the returns are astronomical.
And this, I can tell you, is the best investment that I ever made.
DB.