From a readworthy interview of Tim Ferriss by GQ magazine:
I know centi-millionaires and billionaires who are utterly miserable. As Derek Sivers, one of my friends and podcast guests, once said, “If more information were the answer, we’d all be billionaires with six-pack abs”… The inescapable fact that if, at best, you tolerate yourself, and more often berate, hate, or criticize yourself, how can you possibly fully engage with others, accept and love them, and find peace of mind and life? I think the answer is you can’t.
To borrow from Tarah Brach, she said to me once, “There was a wise old sage who said, ‘There’s really only one question worth considering and that is: What are you unwilling to feel?’” So I really check in, in the morning and at night. Do you wake up with a sense of foreboding and anxiety and a desire to stay in bed? When you go to bed, is it full of anxiety and worries and preoccupation about what happened, or what’s going to happen the next day? If so, that’s an issue.
A good relationship with yourself is the foundation of thriving at life. The problem almost always is that you can hardly work on cultivating an accepting relationship with someone how you treat with distaste. I dealt with this for a long time – years. I wrote to myself then
“If I treated another person like this they would not survive for even a short period of time… Finally, even meditating on this is difficult. My mind is filled with hate about the person meditating. This means that when awareness returns after my thoughts wander, instead of observing that fact and moving on, there is an eruption of castigation at the meditator’s inability to even hold their own thought.
This is when external counselling helps – it’s an intervention for both of your you-s to talk to each other.