Remove all of the jargon and fancy frameworks, and every self-improvement technique falls into one of two buckets:
- Eliminate Dissonance
- Increase Meaning
That’s it.
Everything in the self-help universe drives you toward one of these two outcomes. Master these two processes, and you will be on an unstoppable path toward a happier, more fulfilling life.
This guide is the distillation of over a decade of self-experimentation on my own path of personal development. After spending the first 37 years of my life as a prototypical type-A overachiever, I’ve spent the last decade obsessing over one question: what makes a truly great life?
My journey has forced me to examine my beliefs about money, meaning, success, and spirituality. I’ve tried just about every self-improvement modality I could find, and this guide is a ruthlessly simple but effective distillation of every therapy session, coaching retreat, meditation practice, and book that has helped me along the way.
Understanding these two categories doesn’t shortcut the work. It simply reveals the game at hand. And once you see the pattern, you can move through the work with precision rather than guessing.
Finding and Eliminating Dissonance
Dissonance occurs when who you believe you are, what you do, and how you live don’t align. Eliminating dissonance is the process of removing the internal and external contradictions that create unnecessary suffering. Internal dissonance is when you say one thing and do another in relation to yourself. External dissonance is when your values don’t align with your behavior in relation to others and the world. Both drain your energy and make it impossible to feel at peace in your own skin. Your external experience doesn’t match your inner experience. Eliminating dissonance doesn’t make life effortless – it simply removes the constant drag of being at war with yourself.
Internal Dissonance: The War with Self
Internal dissonance is the tension that comes from being divided against yourself. You say you want one thing and do another. You believe something but behave in opposition to that belief. When contradictory forces are not resolved, we end up suppressing the feelings that surface in relation to the contradiction. This shows up as anxiety, procrastination, perfectionism, self-doubt, self-judgment, and chronic stress because your nervous system is constantly trying to reconcile conflicting directives. The first step in eliminating internal dissonance is telling the truth to yourself.
This is no easy task. We love to trick ourselves. It’s much easier to lie to ourselves about what we want, how things should be, or the life we should be living than it is to get radically honest about it.
Here’s a fairly typical example of a statement that may look true on the surface but is textbook dissonance: “I can’t quit this job I hate because I need the money.”
The reason this is tricky is that it contains a kernel of truth – we all need money to survive. But let’s look closer. “I can’t quit this job” gives up agency. This is a false conclusion based on the true portion (I need the money.)
Everything in life is a trade-off. More accurately, it’s an exercise in priorities and probabilities. Quitting a job requires a person to either reduce expenses or navigate uncertainty while finding a new job, or both. What the person is actually saying is that they are unwilling to reduce lifestyle expenses or face the uncertainty of job hunting. They are choosing stability in the face of chaos.
Note that this is not a value judgement on whether the person should quit their job or not. There might be various reasons for or against. But instead of honesty, they’ve chosen the comfortable lie – “I can’t.”
A radically honest statement would look more like this: “I hate my job, but I’m choosing not to quit because I don’t want to give up my lifestyle and face the uncertainty of not having an income while I search for a new one.”
This hasn’t solved their problem of hating their job, but it has eliminated the dissonance created by the illusion of it being outside of their control. Pretending things are outside of our control is one of the most insidious ways we tolerate dissonance.
Notice what happens when we shift to the second statement: we reclaim agency. Now working the job that we hate is a choice. The truth forces us to choose rather than stay stuck. We can choose to quit or stay, but we can no longer pretend we are stuck.
This is the power of eliminating internal dissonance: it forces us to choose. We may not like either option, but we have regained our power and resolved the internal suffering created by feeling trapped when we actually aren’t.
External Dissonance: The War with Reality
External dissonance is the friction between your inner world and the life you are actually living. It’s when your relationships, obligations, work, and social persona do not reflect what you care about or who you really are. External dissonance is what makes people feel trapped, lonely, resentful, or aimless, even when things look good from the outside. The first step in eliminating external dissonance is telling the truth to others, either explicitly or through our actions.
The hallmark of external dissonance is when we betray what we know to be true internally to create harmony, acceptance, or belonging with others.
Take the same example from before, but with a different reason: “I hate my job, but I can’t quit because I’m afraid people will think I failed.”
This takes the agency problem from above and inverts it. Now the conflict isn’t between what we want and what we do, it’s between what we feel privately and perform publicly. Put simply, external dissonance is living one life on the inside and another on the outside.
This type of lie is built on identity, belonging, and social status. Do not underestimate the power of needing to belong. Our brains were wired to keep us in good graces with the tribe, and we will contort ourselves in all kinds of ways to ensure that we remain on the inside.
External dissonance also shows up in our relationships when we believe another lie: “They will leave.” This lie often becomes our baseline operating system. Our brains also evolved as pattern-matching machines, so we are constantly evaluating our environment to match our known library of patterns.
But if our baseline belief is “They will leave,” instead of inhabiting authentic relationships, we start to design our interactions with others as tests to confirm this worldview. We design secret tests that others don’t even know they are a part of, and when they fail the tests, our minds take this as concrete evidence that we are, in fact, alone.
Here’s an example of how this might show up with your partner: “If they really loved me, they would take out the trash without being asked.” Now every time they forget, we can use it as evidence to build our case and prove once and for all that we are unlovable and utterly alone. The particularly pernicious problem with the constant testing is that no amount of evidence to the contrary is enough to shift the view. Even if they take out the trash 99 times, if they forget on the hundredth, our mind says, “Aha! I knew it!” And so goes the perpetual cycle.
To eliminate external dissonance, we must do two things: tell the truth to others about who we are, and tell the truth about what we want and need. In order to resolve external dissonance, you have to embrace two truths.
The first is that no one thinks about you more than you do. When you worry that you can’t quit your job because they will think you are a failure, the reality is that they are worried about themselves and how everyone thinks they are failing. Most people can’t be bothered to consider whether you are failing because they are too caught up with their own self-interests.
The second is that no one can read your mind. As long as you are designing secret tests, you are reinforcing your aloneness. Telling the truth in this area is the simplest way to eliminate dissonance and create harmony in your relationship. It sounds crazy, but you can just simply ask for what you want. Over and over. If you ever find yourself saying, “They should have known,” you are back in the trap. Eliminate those words from your vocabulary.
The Two-Front War
Internal dissonance is lying to yourself. External dissonance is lying to others.
But the truth is that we are doing both at the same time. In reality, it’s rarely one or the other; instead, our suffering is complex and multidimensional. Most adults are fighting both wars at the same time.
So the more realistic version of the same job example is:
“I can’t quit my job because I need the money, I’m afraid people will think I failed, my spouse only loves me if I provide, and my parents won’t be proud of me.”
The work of eliminating dissonance, then, is to systematically identify and resolve the lies, stories, and protective narratives that keep us from inhabiting our authentic life.
In this case, the integrated truth looks something like this: “I hate my job, but I’m choosing to stay because I don’t want to downgrade my lifestyle or lose status in the eyes of others.”
Once this truth is admitted and embodied, we have shifted from suffering to pain. Pain and suffering are different. Pain is a universal human experience; suffering is when we refuse pain and insist that reality should be different than it is.
Eliminating dissonance doesn’t make life painless; it eases the suffering that comes from being at war with reality. Once we stop fighting ourselves and stop performing for others, the second question emerges: what makes the pain worth it? To endure the pain of being alive, we need our experience to mean something. Which leads us directly to step two: increasing meaning.
How to Find Meaning
Once the internal war begins to resolve and the lies begin to fall away, we are confronted with a different set of questions: what is all this for? What are we doing here anyway? And what makes the inevitable pain of being alive worth it?
Humans are wired for meaning. It’s no coincidence that across the breadth of human existence, regardless of time or culture, we have always had systems dedicated to helping us explain these questions. We are meaning-making machines. Coherence frees us from unnecessary suffering, but meaning gives us something worth suffering for.
Meaning emerges from two fundamental and reliable paths: connecting to something greater than self, and serving someone other than self. Note the commonality between the two. Meaning comes when you finally realize it’s not all about you.
Connection to something greater than self diminishes ego and dissolves the boundary between self and others, and service to others is how we express and embody that dissolution. This is why altruism naturally feels good to humans – this is a feature, not a bug. It’s encoded into our DNA.
Connection to Source
There are countless ways to describe this “greater-than-self” phenomenon. Some call it God, the field, the eternal, awareness, the Tao, or the Absolute. The specifics matter far less than the central point: something larger than the self exists, and you can be in relationship with it.
The important thing is that your connection with source helps you to diminish the importance of self through awe. This is most reliably achieved through some flavor of contemplative practice. Again, there are countless modalities: prayer, meditation, journaling, even walking in nature. It doesn’t really matter which one you pick; what matters is that whichever one you choose works for you.
It is insanely remarkable that any of this exists in the first place. The fact that our atoms have been here since the Big Bang and are now, in this moment, arranged as meat sacks hurtling through space in this unique configuration, and conscious of that fact, is a miracle. That alone is enough to justify awe.
As one engages in contemplative practice, we start to understand two things that are seemingly paradoxical: we as individuals are so tiny and irrelevant to the cosmos that our daily worries are insignificant, and that because the unique miracle of waking up in our specific conscious body is so probabilistically rare that the only sane response is to live fully in each moment.
The other thing that emerges through practice is that we start to realize that we are all connected. Not just to our fellow humans, but to all sentient beings, our planet, and yes, the entire cosmos. That connection yields a key element for a meaningful life: compassion.
Meaning Through Service
The less we view the world through a narrow self and the more we shift to an interconnected lens, the more service becomes a natural byproduct. Service simply means living for someone or something beyond ourselves and making things better in some way. We could be in service to our family, our community, our nation, or the entire world, or all simultaneously. Scale matters much less than the felt sense of participation; this experience is the portal to a meaningful life.
While living in service might seem simple, we are often confused about how to actually do it. Service does not mean sacrificing the self; we are part of the greater good, and serving at one’s own expense is martyrdom. True service is not performative or transactional. Service is aligning self-interest with the interests of the whole. Service generates meaning because it collapses loneliness and redirects our pain toward something useful.
Awakening to source without service is incomplete. It creates insight, but not impact. Service is how awakening is translated into meaning.
So Now What?
Most of what we call self-help is really just these two moves. Therapy, coaching, meditation, religion, philosophy, shadow work, psychedelics — different tools, same two outcomes. Master these two arcs, and your life will get better.
You don’t need to do everything at once. You don’t need to fix your entire life. Tell the truth to yourself and others. Care about something bigger than yourself. That’s it. Everything else unfolds from there.
Life becomes worth living when it stops being all about you.
Stop waiting. Start living.
To waking up and cleaning up,
Mb
P.S. I launched a new project with my friend Kevin – The Inner Circle. The whole idea is for us to take the conversations we’re already having about what makes a great life and hit record. Unpolished, raw, and real. One topic, fifteen minutes. We just dropped Episode 3: Change My Mind. I’d love for you to check it out and if you do, let me know what you think about this format!
Full episode here: Apple | Spotify | Youtube
