Facing Your Demons
Your Own Worst Enemy
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today’s topic provides practical insight for dealing with the things that hold you back from exploring, creating, and learning. We name your worst enemy, identify the drivers, and then provide a compilation of skills, insights, and tools to help fight. Let’s dive in!
We’re just going to face this problem straight out of the gate:
Your worst enemy is yourself.
No one else will screw with your brain as much as you.
No one will ever hold you back more than you.
It doesn’t matter if someone else planted the seed.
It doesn’t matter if there was trauma at some time.
No one else can fix you. No laws, agencies, or rules can protect you.
In the end, it comes down to your agency and how you do you!
This is why the Mixed Mental Arts we explore here always starts with an internal application of the ideas before we ever attempt to externalize and expect anyone else to do them. Improvement requires you to take action, even if it’s just baby steps. As Kyle Shepard says: “Slowmentum is better than nomentum.”
Here’s a great example: A friend of mine, looking to start publishing a Substack, is wracked with her fears and uncertainty of taking that action. No one is stopping her. No one is saying she shouldn’t. Others are encouraging. Her worst critic is herself.
Now, to be fair, writing on Substack isn’t easy. You have to put yourself out there, you have to add value, you have to find an audience and work to grow them. The vast majority of Substacks fail in their first year as the quick and easy ideas are used up, and the slow roll of trying to find new ideas or new topics starts to grind.
Some get stuck in a niche and can’t break out. Some have been writing for years with a trickle of subscribers while watching other accounts explode with tens of thousands while cranking out AI-generated slop. But that’s not stopping you. You are. Because, as the meme below states, “The only person coming to save you is the version of yourself that’s tired of your current situation.”
But when we say “tired,” we have to recognize that you have a shocking amount of energy to accept your current situation. Let that sink in a bit. You’ll spend an inordinate amount of energy avoiding your own salvation. As Andrew Perlot recently pointed out, the solutions to your problems aren’t so complicated as you pretend they are, but counterintuitively:
People happily pay for “unique” complexity that claims to sidestep a simple but hard solution.
That’s why your worst enemy is you. It’s stopping you, not through passive non-action, but more often through incredibly energized and active avoidance. You aren’t holding yourself back. You’re actively stopping yourself from moving forward.
So enough with the excuses. Jump into the Unknown and take the step of learning how to execute in uncertainty. This doesn’t mean going willy-nilly without guardrails, but with intention, curiosity, and a sense of adventure.
But, don’t be stupid. Instead, look at the ways you might fail, acknowledge them, and name those fears. You’ll be amazed at how contextualizing them deflates them, and they become smaller than you feared.
For my aspiring writer friend, there’s a ton of advice for how to write, but I’ve found the best insight is looking at how not to write. A lot of the time, the canned and generic advice causes self-doubt because everyone else is doing it. Invert the tropes and learn from that.
Will it be hard? Oh hell yes. This Substack is always challenging. It can feel miserable to grow slowly and organically. It sucks having to keep hawking and promoting. I’d love a powerful celebrity to find this and share it with their followers. But that won’t likely happen, and you know what. It’s OK. Because you can do hard things. Sometimes embracing the negative gives you the grit to drive on.
Will you fail? Maybe… but you aren’t some fragile creature who can’t adapt and overcome. You are antifragile and can get stronger through the very thing you fear. In fact, what makes you fragile is avoiding challenges.
Because the key to overcoming your worst enemy is reframing failure itself. True failure is not learning from what happened. That’s why Polymathic Being’s core principle is to Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn.
So, maybe that Substack won’t work out, but she’ll still have won because when you face your demons, face your own worst enemy, you’ll have overcome the biggest hurdle: starting. Because remember, Slowmentum is better than nomentum.
When was a time you faced your worst enemy? What did you learn?
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency
This is something I've been thinking over a lot this past week.
I saw someone behave in what I considered an unruly manner and felt tempted to tell them off. I had a project to work on that pushed me outside my comfort zone and felt tempted to wallow in anxiety. I got rejected by someone I like and felt tempted to feel ashamed.
It's natural to have such demons, but it doesn't mean we must give in to them. We have agency to do what's right, even if — rather, especially if — it feels difficult.
Doing the right thing is training for our mind like physical exercise is training for the body.
Really solid framing on the active avoidance piece. Most self-help stuff treats inaction like its passive laziness but the way people actually sabotage themselves is way more energetic than that, like we build whole systems to avoid the obvious move. Last year i spent months researching the perfect productivity tools instead of just writting the damn thing, classic active evasion disguised as preparation.