Workaholic is Slacker: The True Form of Indiscipline
Running away from being viewed as inadequate is the main reason we fail to develop discipline.
Inferiority Complex
You hear the stories of successful people, talking about how hard they work and how disciplined they are. You compare yourself to them and feel hurt inside. You push yourself very hard to keep up with their pace.
Sometimes, you work day and night, always tired. You think your well-being and relaxation are insignificant compared to the feeling of self-worth you’ll gain after success.
When your body and mind reach their limit and start protesting through procrastination, mental illness, or excessive sleep, you feel ashamed and try to compensate by exerting yourself even more.
You are facing inferiority complex, trapped in a cycle of bouncing between being an overachieving workaholic and an undisciplined slacker, with little to no control over yourself.
At the core, you have an excessive fear of being viewed as inadequate. You burn yourself out trying to escape inadequacy, but in the long run, you end up failing, and the gap between you and truly successful people widens.
You learn that the true path to success and freedom is only paved for those who achieve consistency and discipline. What you don’t know is that your overexertion, driven by the fear of inadequacy, is the very wall blocking you from being consistent and disciplined.
The Dualities
Every suffering in this world is a form of fixation on one side of a duality. In this case, ambition and contentment are the light and shadow we are chasing and running away from.
When combined with the duality of introversion and extraversion, this creates the behavior cycle of an ambitious, humble being.
Personality Bouncing
When a person fixates on achieving success and showing excellence while avoiding failure and inadequacy, their personality bounces between being an overachieving workaholic and an undisciplined slacker.
Our personality under the mask is the inverse of the face we show to society. We cannot develop discipline because we don’t develop the social facing contentment to accept our failures and inadequacies.
Discipline, and any qualities of inward ambition, are not something you can force into yourself, they are the results that reflect your outward contentment.
Demon and Pig
The personality of someone who strives to show off their competency and runs away from inadequacy can be called a demon. A demon seeks to become a god at the expense of its own well-being.
Inside, the true form of a demon is a timid pig. The pig has an inferiority complex; he never achieves anything by his own motivation but keeps exerting himself out of fear of the demon that watch over him.
Lion of Contentment
Everyone is born incompetent, but we have the potential to bring gifts to the world in our own ways when we are allowed to walk at our own pace.
However, human world is dangerous. It’s a place where we try our best to survive and difficult to avoid attacking the self-worth of others.
Our job is to beat the demon and become a lion of contentment. This means ignoring the voices that try to deceive us into losing our pace. A lion hunts without yielding to the temptation of praise, and rests without fear of being viewed as inadequate.
Sustainable Achiever
Having the fear of being viewed as inadequate means you rely on success and competence to prove your self-worth. Doing so makes you feel as hurt as death spiritually when you face failure and inadequacy.
In social facing situation, you are obsessed with your own imagination of how people will praise you, driving you to work non-stop. When your personality inverts, you become a shameful slacker who never knows how to relax.
Your ambition is fake; it is not yours but a curse of a demon implanted in you by social illness. Authentic ambition reveals itself only on the foundation of unwavering contentment.
When you learn to untie your self-worth from these qualities, you become a sustainable achiever, working out of your authentic ambition, knowing moderation and humility.
On the other hand, you rest out of your authentic contentment as a disciplined relaxer, taking time to recharge without inherent stress, easily maintaining discipline with very little or no resistance.
These two personalities combine smoothly, creating the identity consonance of a lion, leading to a sustainable flow of life where you walk at your own pace.
