Personal Values: How to Know Who You Really Are

Evidence-Based

What are your most important personal values? Do you actually value
what you say you do, or are you lying to yourself? And just who the hell
are you anyway?
31 minute readPhilosophy

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F or the last few years, I’ve had an idea for a satirical self-help article

called, “The Productivity Secrets of Adolf Hitler.” The article would feature all
the popular self-help tropes—goals, visualizations, morning routines—except
expressed through the exploits of Hitler.
“Hitler starts his day at 5 AM each morning with a quick round of yoga and five
minutes of journaling. With these strategies, he’s able to focus his mind on his
highly ambitious goals.”

“Hitler discovered his life purpose in a beer hall in his 20s and has since
followed it relentlessly, thus infusing his life with passion and inspiring millions
of others like himself.”

“Adolf is a strict vegetarian, and makes sure to find time in his busy schedule
of genocide and world domination to explore his creative side: he sets aside a
few hours each week to listen to opera and paint his favorite landscapes.”

I know that I would find the article hilarious. But that’s because I’m a sick,
twisted fuck. But in the end, I’ve never quite worked up the courage to write
the thing, for clear and obvious reasons.
I’ve been doing this long enough to know that a) a bunch of people would get
offended and devote themselves entirely to ruining my week with annoying
emails and social media screeds, b) the satire would go over a bunch of
people’s heads and they’d think that I was actually a Nazi, and c) some awful
publication somewhere would run the headline, “Bestselling author outs
himself as alt-right neo-Nazi” or some shit and my career would be over.

So, I’ve never written the article. Call me a coward. But it remains unwritten.

This bugs me a little bit because I think satirizing Hitler’s incredible

productivity and influence perfectly embodies a point I’ve long made about the
self-help world: achieving success in life is not nearly as important as our
definition of success. If our definition of success is horrific—like, say, world
domination and slaughtering millions—then working harder, setting and
achieving goals, and disciplining our minds all become a bad thing. 

If you remove the moral horrors from Hitler, on paper, he’s one of the
most successful self-made people in world history. He went from being a
broke, failed artist, to commandeering an entire country and the most powerful
military in the world in a matter of two decades. He mobilized and inspired
millions. He was tireless and shrewd and intensely focused on his goals. He
arguably influenced world history as much as anyone who has ever lived.

But all of that work went toward demented, destructive aims. And tens of
millions of people died horrifically due to his twisted, misguided values.