You are Your Own Worst Enemy, Fight It Off

You are your own worst enemy because no one else makes your choices for you. Even if you were dealt a bad hand, there’s a way for you to escape the hand. Even dominate the opponent. This doesn’t mean that it’s your fault but it does mean that you have to fight enemies within yourself to win.

Unless you are living in North Korea, there’s always a way for you to come out on top no matter what life throws at you. It could be to leave an abusive household or it could be to leave an abusive country for better opportunities. Will it be hard? Absolutely. Is it impossible? Absolutely not.

There are many things that I was addicted to. Gambling, video games, and day trading. Gambling cost me approximately $20,000 to recover from. Video games cost me approximately 30 hours per week for ~10 years straight to recover from. I couldn’t break the endless loop cycle that comes from addiction.

That was because I didn’t know that I was my own worst enemy. I didn’t know how to exercise self control because I was already so hooked on dopamine that it was difficult to break out of. I fortunately quit cold turkey out of those nasty habits but it took years of quit attempts to finally get there.

Relapse was a familiar theme in my life. Just as I was my own worst enemy, you are your own worst enemy as well. There’s no breaking out of it. The reason why you are not successful may not be the environment you surround yourself in. The reason may actually just be you and you can’t accept that as true or fact.

There’s no room for the victim mentality on the road to greatness.

What Does “You Are Your Own Worst Enemy” Mean?

It means that the cause of bad and negative outcomes in your life is you yourself. Not because of external factors like what school you attended. But because of internal factors like your character and personality. There are few choices others force us to make. However, your life’s responsibility solely lies on you.

When you accept that you are the cause of the negative events in your life, you get to go to the second step towards progress. The next step is acceptance. However, before that step, you have to recognize that you are your own worst enemy first. Otherwise you won’t make sound decisions that positively impact your life.

Take a step back and think about why you are not at where you wanted to be. Did you honestly devote your time and attention to achieving it? There are many life priorities that get in our way as we progress through life. With that comes additional responsibilities we didn’t foresee happening.

Quantify and track your effort. Did you really work on the marriage or were you just physically present for your significant other but not mentally? Was your attention elsewhere? How many hours did you really put into devoting for your partner? What will always be true is that the numbers don’t lie.

You are your own worst enemy if you let subjectivity cloud an objective outcome. There are many times when I just “felt” like I put in a good amount of effort. I measured that by how many hours I put in. However, it’s not about the hours that I put in, it’s about the intensity of the practice during those hours.

Just physically being present isn’t enough. There’s much more to it than that if I want to be better than the average.

Why You Are Your Own Worst Enemy

One reason why you are your own worst enemy is because you’re not SMACKING that social share button and posting to your favorite social media! Are there stage fright issues that are making you hesitant to share with your friends? Are you worried what your friends are going to think about when you share?

Whatever the answer may be, it’s a productive thing to share articles and knowledge across the web for everyone’s benefit! When we grow together, we win together and as long as the pie gets bigger for all of us, everyone wins.

So with that said, let’s get into the reasons why you have to fight enemies within yourself.

1) There’s Always a Way Out

No matter what hand you’re dealt, there’s always a way out. There’s an infinite number of possibilities to play the hand you’re dealt. Do you have criticizers critiquing you? You can choose to either engage with them and think that they are right. Or you can choose to ignore them and know that they are wrong.

Is it harder to go through life when you have criticizers in your corner trying to take you down as soon as the opportunity presents itself? Absolutely. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. You always have a way to adjust to outside forces and destroy the competition.

Whatever your opponent throws at you, there’s a way to adapt and throw a counter punch right back at them. An even harder counter punch, at that. If you don’t have wifi, there are places with free public wifi. If you don’t own a computer, you can make a trip to the local library and access the internet that way.

You are your own worst enemy if you are stuck in life right now. There’s always a way out to come out ahead, even if it may be harder or more time consuming.

2) You Make the Choices

You are your own worst enemy and solely responsible for your life because you’re the one with the power to choose. You choose whether you wake up groggy because you control what time you go to bed. If there’s an important presentation or an interview coming up, you choose whether to spend time over-preparing for the meeting.

Your life is your choice. Do you choose to save and invest your money so that one day you break free from the golden handcuff shackles? Or do choose to spend your money on Starbucks coffee twice a day because you don’t feel like making your own coffee at home?

Whatever your life is like today, it’s a direct result of your choices. No one forced you to make the choices, you chose them yourself. Who you are today is a direct result of the accumulation of choices you made years ago. What choices will you make today that will affect and build your life two years from today?

It’s exciting to see what you will choose to do. Set a timeline for two years from today and exactly see where your decisions take you.

3) Emotions Work Against You

You are your own worst enemy because of your emotion. When we experience a new thing in our life, it scares us because we’re not used to the experience. By definition, progress requires you to get to a new level every time you level up. Then by definition, you will be scared and exhilarated when you reach a new level.

In general, we like to stay in a state of homeostasis where our feeling of comfort is at the highest level. Therefore, when we realize that a new high means that our emotions will spike, we don’t like it. That’s when our emotions work against us and are preventing us from leveling up to the top of the mountain.

It’s emotions like fear, uncertainty, and doubt at the unknown that works so much against us. You start to think about the worst case scenario. We can’t let that happen. How regretful would you be if you let someone else take your promotion because you didn’t feel ready for the new responsibilities.

Maybe the regret seeps through today but in a couple of years, it’ll turn into anger. Especially if the promotion is no longer available. Consider your emotions carefully.

4) You Don’t Want to Fail Through Your Choices

There are many articles out there who tout the importance of listening. They all talk about how listening to others’ opinions is what successful people do because they didn’t let ego get in the way of business. How listening is the answer to why they are not successful because it removes arrogance out of the equation.

So then you listen to that and take other people’s opinions into account above your own. So then, when you make choices because of other people’s inputs, thoughts, and opinions, you gladly do so because well, it’s not your choices. It’s someone else. Then when you actually do fail, you can blame others because it stemmed from them.

That’s why you are your own worst enemy. You would rather fail by listening to others and shift the blame from yourself to someone else. When the better action is to take the choice yourself and shift the blame to yourself. When you fail or win because of yourself, that’s when you can pinpoint the cause of failures to move forward.

However, don’t let others make that choice for you. It’s devastating when you fail because you listened to other people’s opinions.

5) You Take Comfort in the Comfort Zone

Take more risks and take more chances. More failures mean great things as long as you have more success. Don’t be a weenie baby and just get up and make things happen. The comfort zone is there as a survival tactic. Our genetics passed that onto us because if we valued safety in the past.

We needed food, shelter, and water in order to survive and pass our genes down to our children. That’s why the comfort zone exists and why we value it so highly. We don’t want to leave it. It’s also why you are your own worst enemy. These days, the comfort zone is an evolutionary disadvantage rather than an advantage.

Crime rates are down in the developed world. Although we are not 100% safe 100% of the time, we are safer than in historical periods. The comfort zone is preventing us from taking more risks and chances that could benefit our life in the best way possible. Break free from this zone because it’s not good.

Every no gets you closer to a yes. That was my mantra when I called alumni to raise money for my university. If I don’t ask, I never get.

My You are Your Own Worst Enemy Story

I have my own “you are your own worst enemy” stories like my gambling and video game addiction that I eventually broke free from. To keep a long story short, I quit cold turkey. I quit video games the summer before going to university because I thought “college was supposed to be hard, how else was I going to compete?”.

Although I was wrong (college wasn’t hard), I’m glad I still did it. When it came to gambling, I quit because I felt decimated and brutally hurt by my losses. I calculated that reaching financial freedom would be mathematically impossible at this rate. Therefore, I quit. It’s been three years since I even picked up a chip.

Another story involves social media. Throughout the past 10 years, I constantly and consistently attempted to quit Facebook and any form of social media. Every couple of weeks or so, I would constantly log back in to my Facebook profile that I constantly deactivated. I couldn’t fight the urge to check back in and see what others were up to.

I realized that I was my own worst enemy. One day, I recognized that it’s gotten too far and realized that I haven’t logged into my Facebook in over a year. Somewhere along the way, I finally successfully fought the demon inside me that was keeping me hours of valuable time away from productivity.

Whatever your vice, addiction or guilty pleasure is, you are your own worst enemy. You need to figure out a way to quit it eventually if it is not what you want your life to be consumed by. It could be smoking, not going to the gym, binge watching favorite TV shows, or uncontrollable shopping urges.

Whatever it is, fight and and conquer that enemy. You are in control.

When You Are Your Own Worst Enemy, Stop It

The chemical that enables you being your own worst enemy is called dopamine. it’s what makes you continue doing things that aren’t good for you but do things that make you feel good. There are many vices that are being invented to keep you from living your best life ever.

These days, researches know your bodily chemicals to see what makes you tick and what influences you. When they hook you on this chemical called dopamine is when you are trapped in your own jail cell. Stop letting this chemical consume your everyday life to the point where you can’t make your own choices.

The first step to breaking free is recognizing when you are being manipulated and influenced so that your choices aren’t yours. Then take many attempts to break free from that jail you put yourself inside. It’s not going to happen overnight. Quitting cold turkey works temporarily then you will revert back to your old habits.

Then you attempt to quit cold turkey again, then again, then again. Then a couple of years later, you will finally be able to break free. One day, a light switch will pop up into your head and think what bad choices you’ve been making in the past. As long as you recognize and are actively attempting to quit, you will eventually quit.

It doesn’t matter if it takes longer than expected, what matters is that you achieve the intended goal. If I was able to do it after numerous attempts, you can easily do it as well. Continue to actively make the necessary choices and attempts and you will sail your way to freedom. You are your own worst enemy. Do not let it win.

Your life is too valuable and precious for that to happen.