Looking good vs Feeling good: My true story about success

This is a photo of me taken by a photographer the Forbes team sent to my apartment for a story in their magazine in 2017. Let’s call it the height of my success. I weigh about 220lbs on a 6’4” frame, can deadlift 485lbs for two repetitions, and am as shredded as I’ve ever been in my life. The picture is taken in the 2000 sqft loft I live in, in downtown Manhattan. Rent is $7,500 a month, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows looking down on Broadway and includes a spacious rooftop garden. I have a few million bucks in the bank and many more left in stock in the business I started 6 years prior. I’m sleeping with several gorgeous women in what I learned to be classic New York dating style. And, at the moment this picture was taken, I’d just started a new business 2 months prior that I’ve just received an acquisition offer for over several million bucks.

And, whether you can see it or not, or believe it or not, I’m more unhappy than I’ve ever been in my life at that point. I just didn’t know it. In fact, the dude you’re looking in the eye above is a few weeks away from leaving it all behind to go and live in a Buddhist monastery and disappearing for almost 2 years.

What life had me believe up to this point is that what I have in the picture above is the pinnacle of success and everything I’ve ever wanted. All the signs of all the things I read and worked for pointed towards it.

But it’s all a lie that roughly around the time of taking that picture began to unravel for me. And it was about to come crashing down hard on me. Like a giant pinball that rolled all the way up to the highest peak and was about to come tumbling down on the other side of the mountain destroying everything in its way.

Looking good for me was about learning to play the part: make money, be agreeable, kiss asses, don’t show too much of yourself and your emotions, work hard, work out, play hard, get drunk, hook up, yadayadayada

And it lead nowhere. Or more precisely not at all to what I had imagined. All I had was a big fucking emptiness inside that I needed to get busier and busier to cover up.

The bad news is, I still got that today, in more moments than I care to admit. But I got something else too, and that’s the good news.

The journey from looking good to feeling good

Since the moment of that picture and my time in the monastery, I’ve been on a slow, often painful transition to go from trying to look good to feeling good.

And every human I’ve ever met secretly or openly wants that more than anything: to finally feel good about themselves – from the inside out.

And how do you do that? Through fucking hard work where you’ll have nothing to show for it, except, you guessed it, sometimes feeling good about yourself, from the inside out.

The bitchiest precursor to “feeling good” that most people get hung up with and therefore never make any real progress towards that goal is “feeling”. Learning how to feel is hands down the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted in my life. And it’s quite frankly the only thing I ever teach my clients in the thousand+ sessions I’ve given to date. With “feeling” I don’t mean the identifying of emotions so much, but the direct, sensate experience of your body from the inside out: I’m talking about your ability to notice.

Take this moment and pause reading for a moment, close your eyes and see what you can notice from the inside out of your body – as I’m writing this, I notice my upper belly being a bit tight. Pressure on my temples and forehead, slightly sharp pain behind my right shoulder blade, tightness in my lower spine, openness and spaciousness in my lower belly. A deep exhale as I’m typing these experiences down.

Radical honesty, the modality I’m currently most interested in identifies 3 areas of reality where we can practice noticing. As Brad Blanton writes in his book “Radical Honesty”, there’s a way to distinguish between:

• Inside the confines of our skin,
• outside the confines of our skin
• inside our thinking minds.

Learning to be with these three areas of life in an unmodified way sounds so simple, yet almost never happens. We don’t speak the actual thoughts in our heads, we don’t even know the actual sensations in our bodies and we miss most of the things to notice outside of ourselves. So what do we spend our time with? Turning in on our thoughts and mental chatter through a myriad of conflicting inner voices. Or talking about the fucking weather. Anything but what’s currently present for us. We’re really quite pathetic if you think about it in that way.

The business of feeling good then is a grueling journey of more or less completely changing where we put our attention and how we act. But a rewarding one!

The 5 most important aspects of learning to feel good:

1. Friends that also want to feel good instead of look good: this is my new #1 point and insight. You can’t do this alone and a coach or therapist is not enough. You need, NEED, others that want to engage with this around you. This is a prescription, you can make some progress on your own but it will be very limited in my experience. Find a friend and ask them if they are interested in joining you in the business of feeling good together.
2. A human that has practiced it that can teach you: call it teacher, therapist, guru, coach, mentor, whatever. To learn how to feel good and to feel in general the guidance of someone who is practiced in it is crucial. They won’t have “mastered” it – no one has, don’t go for perfect. Find someone that is good enough in their ability to notice and can show and teach you reasonably well. You’ll find better ones along the way. And practice with them, once a week, for a few years, at least. The modalities I’m most of a fan of to find a teacher in are: Radical Honesty, the Grinberg Method, Somatic experiencing, Vipassana Meditation. I wrote more about them all here.
3. Nature: go to the forest regularly. At least once a week. There’s nothing that puts us in touch with our ability to notice as much as being in the natural world.
4. Silence: find a way to be with it. Silence is how you practice noticing on your own when you’re not in dialogue with a friend or guide.
5. Contemplative sports: ecstatic dance, yoga, sauna, boxing, horse riding are some of my favorite. or any form of movement really with the underlying intention to learn how to notice. If you do it to win, it won’t work, do it to have fun and be curious and learn how to notice.

Sitting here and writing this, I already feel discouraged thinking about the lives most people live which makes this kind of life I’m describing, a much more fulfilling life in my eyes, hard to accomplish: long hours on the job, kids, partner routines, money problems and all the other ways you’re keeping yourself busy currently. Some say “well every situation can be your teacher if you’re mindful enough!”. That’s true in theory and complete bullshit in practice. In, fact, I’ll bet you $1 million, that you will not find anybody deemed “enlightened” or able to occasionally feel good from the inside who hasn’t practiced all 5 of the above points regularly and for years. There’s no way around it!

I find it funny how strong-minded and pointed I feel writing this blogpost so far, haha. Oh well!

What’s the reward?

Maybe you are also fed up with your current way of life, the hiding, the lying, the sense of not being really present with what’s there inside of you. Well, if you work on it, then don’t get your hopes up too much. The reward you get from doing it isn’t particularly great. After many years of this process, the reward is that occasionally you’ll feel good, meaning more connected to yourself and others than you’ve ever felt before in your life, in a warm, cuddly, open, and spacious way. And in plenty, honestly most of the other moments of your life you will feel shit, hateful, angry, sad, lonely, tight, shivery, shaky, and so forth.

And however bleak that is, it’s still a million times better than the perfect story that looks good from the outside the way I look in that picture above. Because in that picture above I’m dead. And I’d rather be alive with the measly results you get because that’s what the human experience happens to contain. And when you know what you’re feeling because you’ve learned to notice, most of these “bad” emotions aren’t even that bad. So you can cheer up, a little at least.

Give me a shout if any of this resonates, I like hearing about it.

Ps: I created a group program from the amazing response to this article called “Radical Presence – An 8 Week Program to create a life you will mostly hate, occasionally love & definitely not feel indifferent about anymore“. Check it out and see if it’s a match for you.