In December 2018 I put a short post on LinkedIn. “Your greatest asset? It’s YOU!” and underneath it, one line: “Love yourself like your life depends on it (because it does).”
The idea is Kamal Ravikant’s. It’s the title of a little book I’ve read five times, according to my Goodreads. That’s a lot, from someone who gets through about a book a week.
It’s really simple. Love yourself like your life depends on it, because it does.
Ravikant wrote it after a dark stretch. His health had collapsed, a business had gone under, and he was in a bad place. Then one day he made a decision. He would love himself, deliberately, and keep doing it until he believed it. That meant telling himself “I love myself” over and over, in his head, in meditation, even looking in the mirror. It sounds daft. He knows it sounds daft. It worked for him anyway.
The book is short enough to read in an hour, and that’s part of its power. There’s no twelve-week programme and no complicated framework. Just one practice, explained honestly by someone who needed it.
The practice itself is about repetition. You say it to yourself again and again, long after it feels silly, until some part of you starts to believe it. Tony Robbins, one of my mentors, says repetition is the mother of skill, and I’ve quoted it in my own videos. Loving yourself turns out to be a skill like any other. You get better with practice, and you get worse if you stop.
If you want to try it, it’s easy to start. Say it in your head. Notice how odd it feels. Keep going anyway. Nobody else needs to know you’re doing it.
The question
The line I come back to most is a question he asks himself.
“If I loved myself truly and deeply, would I let myself experience this?”
I like it because it works on everything, big and small. What you eat. Who you spend time with. How you speak to yourself when something goes wrong. How long you stay in a situation that’s making you miserable. Ask the question honestly and you usually know the answer straight away.
I think about that question next to my own health story. There was a time when I abused my body for over ten years. I became obese and developed multiple illnesses. Someone who loved himself truly and deeply would never have let himself go through that. Asked honestly, the question only has one answer.
Life will love you the way you love yourself, the way you choose to show up. In my experience, until you learn to love yourself deeply, you’ll struggle to love others and to feel loved by them. It’s a very practical idea once you start using it.
You’re the only you there is
Back in 2015 I made a video series called Tune Into the True You. One of the days was all about accepting everything about yourself. The only person you can ever be is you. You can show up as different versions of you, and you can become the best version of you. But everything that’s happened to you so far is what made you who you are.
The task that day was a victories list. Write down your wins, big ones and tiny ones. Did you get yourself dressed this morning? There was a time you couldn’t. That counts. When you start from celebration instead of criticism, you open your mind to bigger things. It’s a small way of practising exactly what Ravikant is talking about: treating yourself like someone worth cheering for.
It’s a short read and an easy read. It’s also a life-changing one. Read it once and you’ll get the idea. Read it five times, like I have, and it starts to change the way you talk to yourself.
It’s one of the self-worth books in my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me. It’s also one of the quickest reads on the list.
Maybe it’s time you were on your own side for a change.
