"What's this need you have to harass yourself all day long? Shall I tell
you what it is, in case you can't answer that - which you can't, by the
way. I'll tell you what it is. It's called self-centeredness. It's called
vanity. It's called making yourself the center of everything. Well, are you
not doing that every time you say, 'I'm a failure. I've let other people
down.' And you say, 'What's the matter with me? I'm always doing something
wrong that results in defeat and me feeling bad.'
It's a very tricky stunt you have to keep your mind on yourself regardless
of what you call yourself. And if you want to know a perfect way to make
yourself miserable, that is it. And to prove it, all your ideas about how
inadequate you are, having kept your mind on yourself all the time, has made
this self pretty miserable, hasn't it? You'd better look, then, and see
just why, you have this compulsion to think of yourself as inferior, as
someone who hasn't made it, and worse yet in your mind, someone who is
never going to make it. And so, you feel bad about the whole business.
Let's look at it very closely. How about you looking at it very closely so
you can escape the way you've been living so you always have to be thinking
about yourself as a failure. Now, here's the reason why you do it. You want
to be a success! Well, don't you? Your idea of success, that is. Isn't your
idea of success to make twice as much money as you now do? Isn't your idea
of success to have people come to you, and want you and desire your
company? Now you go to them, don't you? Of course, you do.
You spend your whole day going to other people and you don't even see it,
hoping that you'll be accepted, that they'll like you, that they'll say
something nice. You'll even settle in your desperation to be accepted,
you'll even settle for someone who's more or less neutral. They don't
criticize you and you say, 'Well, that's better than nothing.' You'd rather
have the praise and the flattery. What a dreadful struggle. So, you think
of the word success, which automatically includes the word failure, and the
thinking about failure also includes success. Oh, what a trap."
A New Kind of Success
DVD # 2, talk 4 Blu-ray # 1, talk 7