In this edition of the Peak Performance Newsletter:

We will be discussing:

• Why is ego the enemy?

• Why you aren’t making any consistent progress.

• The counter to ego.

• Actionable steps to be more consistent with humility

Before we begin,

Table of Contents

• In this edition of the Peak Performance Newsletter …

• Is ego really the enemy?

• Why you aren’t making consistent progress.

• The Counter to Ego.

• Actionable steps to be more consistent with humili …

  • Author’s Notes:

Is ego really the enemy?

I’m sure you’ve heard it countless times before, so I won’t bore you too much with the significance of ego. Either from your parents, your peers, your coworkers, and society in general to “not be egotistical and always be humble”.

But in this post, I’m not going to talk about ego in a general sense since that’s a whole different topic for another time, but the importance of it in reference to consistency.

Everyone wants to be consistent, but not everybody gets to be consistent.

We all struggle with being consistent, myself included, whether that means being consistent in our habits, our goals, our work, or sometimes it feels like you can’t be bothered to do the habits that you know are inherently good for you.

3 years ago, I was in the biggest pitfall of my life. I was doing nothing good for myself, and the constant indulgence in the instant gratification (bad habits) were piling up quick.

I tried to be consistent in the gym, journaling, meditating, and waking up early, but my expectations on where I had to meet always conflicted with the current reality of my situation.

But what I want you to get out of this section is that your ego is not going to serve in becoming more consistent with your habits. There is only a select few of individuals who have already made it past that initial barrier of discipline that they’re able to have extremely high expectations of themselves.

Ego in retrospective of self-improvement is defined as the overinflated sense of self that blocks growth by prioritizing pride over progress. Again, pride isn’t necessarily a bad trait but, in this context, it will inhibit you from seeing the truth.

Here’s what I mean by this.

No matter if you think that having an ego is inherently a bad thing or not, we all have it. There’s no going around it, because it is heavily ingrained within our own human nature.

Ego is a defense mechanism that we play to protect ourselves from threats, fears, or from failure.

But there can be a lot of times where your ego can actually benefit you, since it helps you uphold a certain standard or expectation that you have to meet for yourself.

But in the case of being consistent in the long term, this is often the factor that holds us back.

Why you aren’t making consistent progress.

This was a major issue that I was dealing with in my early years of self-improvement. It was only that I took a step back from my ego that I was able to get out of this vicious cycle.

Perhaps this happens a lot to you as well, you try staying consistent in your self -improvement habits for maybe 2, 3, even maybe a week and then you relapse and start over again.

Let me tell you a recent story that will help you paint a better picture.

I’m sure that you’ve maybe noticed that I haven’t been posting consistently for 2 weeks so far. That’s pretty embarrassing on my part, considering that for the previous post I told you that I was going back to a regimented posting schedule.

Throughout that 2-week gap, I tried switching up my routine, prioritizing the little things that didn’t really matter.

“Should I go to this the gym at this certain time to maximize muscle gains or should I work at this time, so I’ll be more productive with my work?”

But in the end, I end up completing none of the tasks that I told myself I was going to do.

Most importantly, I realized that it was my ego that kept me from posting consistently.

And look, I’m not perfect. I mess up a lot, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes throughout my self-improvement journey that costed me a lot of finite time that I can never get back.

But with those mistakes, I take them as learning lessons that I can write in this newsletter so that hopefully you can avoid the same mistakes that I had to experience first-hand.

You’ll know whenever a content creator or a writer is actually being authentic if they put their flaws on display, since it would be much easier for me to just cover it up.

These mistakes help create a sense of accountability, and to keep me responsible with my habits.

So, you might be wondering “How did your ego get in the way of you being consistent?”

It was because I had the overinflated perception that my emails needed to be at least 3k words or higher in order for it to be “high quality” This was the unspoken standard that I’ve kept for myself because I had the self-perception that my emails needed to be longer in order to keep that same level of quality and thus higher quality readers.

My beliefs were “Longer emails = higher quality readers” Shorter emails = lower quality readers”

And for the majority of this newsletter existence, I’ve been able to meet that standard for myself quite well, basically a self-fulfilling prophecy that always worked because I would constantly implant that belief into my mind.

Until it didn’t.

I visualized the deep work task of writing the newsletter at the highest point of discomfort, where I needed to complete the full 3K words before the end of the week.

So, I kept on procrastinating and procrastinating, pushing it further to the deadline, dreading at the visualization of writing that many words.

But the only thing I needed to do was to just break down the steps and start with writing down my thoughts initially.

The truth is that there will always be some days where you are less consistent in your habits than others. That’s just how life is. Whether that means you miss a day or two in the gym, in your work, or anything else, there will be days where you just can’t be bothered to complete that those 2 hrs of deep work.

But, if you look at your life in a bird’s eye view, then the trajectory of the line will actually seem far more exponential than what you originally expected.

Say for example, if you miss one or two days of the gym this week, then you might be freaking out or swearing at yourself for missing so many days. But throughout your entire life, you will still be far more consistent in your habits than not being consistent.

It is only those few days where we miss our habits that we tend to throw our hands in the air and just give up on it.

But as long as you complete the habit, no matter how long or short, it will still amount to some level of growth.

It’s because we’re doing these self-improvement habits for life, not for a short amount of time. What we need to focus on right now isn’t about the initial progress that we obtain, but the consistency that we build with these habits.

But back to my original story, the lesson that I’ve learnt was that I was too focused on maintaining my own expectations that I failed to take a step back and realize that I’m not going to be able to write 3K words worth full of emails every, single, day.

Saying that out loud now sounds like common sense, but it is these beliefs that you aren’t aware of until you take the time to write them out.

Yes, the ideal day is that I WILL write 3K words, but I had to accept that not every day is going to be in my favor.

So, when shit hits the fan, I can’t start thinking to myself “Oh man, I better write 3k words by the end of this week or else I’m a pussy”.

But instead, I can push my ego aside and think to myself “Sure, the goal was to write 3k words every week but right now, I only have the bandwidth or time to write only 1K-2K words this week.

Even though it might not meet my current expectations, posting something every week is a lot better than giving up and not posting anything.

The Counter to Ego.

So, in order to reflect on my mistakes, there was one skill or virtue in particular that has saved me in times of rut.

This virtue was humility.

Hulmility in my own definition, is defined as the ability to take a step back from the perception of oneself and to understand that there is a lot more left to learn.

This opens the gates for more opportunities and challenges you to look inward.

With humility, you are able to adopt a student mindset not only with self-improvement but with life in general.

A student mindset focuses on the fact that there are still more aspects of life that are left to be discovered and mastered. Ego can limit your own growth by making your thinking rigid and narrow minded, while humility can cause an open mind and greater introspection.

Now you might be confused thinking “Isn’t humility and humbleness the same thing?” Far from it.

Humbleness is about actively undermining or devaluing one’s self-importance while humility is about accepting the opportunity for flaws or mistakes.

This is going to be a controversial take, but we need to start valuing “being humble” far less than we do right now as a society.

Because in my opinion, why would you undermine your own importance at the expense of your own values and freedom?

If you truly believe that you’re going to do great things, then why would you let “being humble” stop you from fulfilling that dream.

If you’re scared about the collective insecurity of other people, then you start focusing on what you want and not on what everybody wants out of you.

I could go down into the rabbit hole of this but being humble in of itself is a separate side point for another day.

In my case, it was my ego of needing to reach my expectations that caused me to relapse in my habits. But if I embraced humility, then I would have been able to take a step back from my ideal expectations and do the absolute bare minimum of what was required.

Should you strive to go the bare minimum for your goals? Of course not.

But are there going to be some occasions where you have to? Absolutely.

I had to swallow my pride and take some time to reflect on where I started.

Sometimes, we are so caught up on what we want to achieve in the future that we don’t take the time to recognize how much progress we’ve made so far.

3 years ago, I was lazy and had no direction to my life, I didn’t even know that self-improvement existed. I would have never imagined in 100 years that I would be able to amass a loyal audience of readers dedicated to improving their lives just like myself.

Actionable steps to be more consistent with humility:

If I’m being honest, I was thinking about dragging this out a bit more, but I want to give you quick, action-packed advice on how you can go about becoming more consistent.

So, in steps, I will give you a list of actionable steps on what you can do to ensure that you check off all of your habits through humility.

1. Lower the barrier to entry.

What I mean by this is the amount of resistance that it takes for you to fully complete a habit. So, if you had to complete 2 hr gym session everyday, then it might have a very high barrier to entry for you specifically.

But the same habit with a low barrier to entry might be you just preforming 20 pushups every day. Regardless of how busy you are, everyone can drop down and do 20 pushups pretty quickly.

That’s what we need if we want to be consistent.

This is going to vary from your level in regard to your self-improvement journey. So whatever that level might be, make sure the barrier to entry is so low that it is literally impossible to miss the habit.

So, me for example, my high barrier of entry would be doing 3K words or more on my emails whilst my low barrier to entry is writing 800 to 1K words.

The point is to set the barrier to entry as low as possible to ensure that it is feasible that you can get the work done without any resistance.

While initially starting this post, I’ve convinced myself that I would only write 500-800 words for today’s post. And with that belief, I had the bandwidth necessary to go way over that fresh hold since I made the initial start with as little resistance as possible.

I could have convinced myself that I was going to only write a sentence for this week’s email and it would have caused me to enter in a flow state.

The end goal is that you have to focus on the consistency and not the initial results.

2. Ditch your ego.

This step is going to be the most difficult but yet the most rewarding one. We all have an inner ego, if we like to admit it or not. But with dropping your ego comes with the reward of being consistent. Not going to lie, it pained me to say that I would only write 500 words for an email since I believed that it was so far below my own self expectations.

And I believe that you’ve felt that same pain whenever I told you to take action in lowering the barrier to entry. I bet that there’s some part of brain that instantly told you

 “No, why would we make it easier for ourselves, that wouldn’t give us any results anyways”

That was your ego talking.

There will always be some kind of pain when you go against your ego. But with that comes with growth.

And that brings me to the last point.

3. Gratitude Journaling.

You might be asking “What does gratitude journaling have to do with silencing your ego?”

I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about gratitude journaling in previous posts. And while it’s best known for improving your mental health, it can also be a great tool in calming down the ego.

This is because gratitude journaling reminds you on where you’ve started.

It reminds you of the setbacks you’ve endured but also the accomplishments that you’ve experienced to get to where you are today. And that holds great power and appreciation on how far we’ve come.

Let me give you an example of my own.

Whenever you put yourself in the shoes of your younger self, then you can begin to truly appreciate the hard work you’ve done to even be here right now.

Even the fact that I’m writing to you right now is a living miracle. Because all it takes is one or two bad moves from my younger self and I could have been a video game, drug addicted, locus who’s just wasting his life away.

But because my younger self-led me down this path, I am now here to speak to you what I’ve learnt in my own self-improvement journey today.

So, take some time either in the morning or the night, to jot down at least 5 things that you are grateful for your younger self for and the accomplishments that you’ve achieved so far.

Whenever you are in a state of gratitude, it is hard for your ego to fight back.

Author’s Notes:

That is all I have for you today. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post and learnt something from it that you can apply to your own self-improvement journey.

I want to hear your feedback on this email on what I can do to further help you elevate on your self-improvement journey.

So, if you comment below what problems you’re dealing with right now, then I can give you personalized actionable advice to help you with your current situation.

I want to build more of an active community on my newsletter so it would be cool to see everyone’s viewpoints so that we can discuss together as likeminded individuals.

Just remember that this isn’t the end, but only just the beginning.

-Jason