Lesson Six: Know Yourself

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”

– Seneca

There’s a phrase that’s been overused to the point of becoming background noise, but it still carries weight if you sit with it long enough: Know thyself.

It sounds simple, like a fortune cookie punchline, but it’s not. Especially not today. In a world where every scroll delivers someone else’s highlight reel, someone else’s six-pack, someone else’s 4 a.m. wake-up call and ultramarathon training schedule, “knowing yourself” feels less like a virtue and more like a liability. Because knowing yourself also means confronting your limits, real or perceived, and that doesn’t make for good content.

I’ve watched the Goggins clips. I’ve admired the discipline, the grind, the sheer inhuman refusal to quit. And part of me wants to chase that. Not the fame or the views, but the edge, the kind of mental toughness that seems to unlock a different plane of living.

But I also know the cost.

I know the days where I’ve pushed too hard and been left more empty than proud. I know the nights where my expectations strangled any sense of satisfaction. When the reps were hit, the work was done, but I still heard the whisper: not enough.

That voice is familiar. And dangerous.

Because chasing the perfect version of yourself, one that eats clean, trains daily, writes deeply, sleeps soundly, builds businesses, leads teams, parents patiently, and never skips a beat, is often another form of self-sabotage. An impossible standard disguised as motivation. And if you’re not careful, you’ll burn every ounce of fuel trying to become someone you were never supposed to be.

The Comparison Trap

There’s also a more subtle danger at play, one that creeps in through the seams of your scrolling: comparison.

We don’t just measure ourselves against greatness anymore. We measure ourselves against illusions. The rented house staged like a dream. The leased car angled just right. The couple smiling for the tenth take of a 15-second reel. We see the highlight and assume it’s the whole movie.

And in doing so, we shrink our own story. We start treating our progress like a disappointment and our pace like a flaw.

But here’s the truth: you don’t know what’s real. You don’t know the debt behind that car or the loneliness behind that vacation. And even if it is all real, it’s not yours, and it never needed to be.

If your self-worth is built on someone else’s projection, it will collapse every time they post a better version of your dream. Knowing yourself means stepping off that carousel entirely. It means living from your values, not someone else’s filtered fantasy.

Effort is Relative. Truth is Personal.

A lot of this clicked for me on a Peloton ride.

Power zone training taught me that we all have different thresholds, and that effort is relative. My Zone 6 might be 350 watts. Someone else’s might be 600. But if we’re both working at our personal limits, we’re both suffering the same. That realization quieted the comparison game. Progress isn’t about catching someone else’s numbers; it’s about being honest with your own. About staying present in your effort instead of distracted by someone else’s metrics. About competing against your previous best self.

Knowing yourself also means knowing where you don’t have an edge and not being afraid to get help. For me, I hired a trainer because I realized the stress of constantly designing workouts and the internal back-and-forth of talking myself out of them was a limiting factor.

It wasn’t about laziness, it was about resource management. I had the discipline to show up, but not always the clarity to plan. That self-awareness didn’t make me weaker. It made me more consistent. More dangerous, even.

You Can Want More Without Hating Where You Are

Here’s what I’m learning, painfully and slowly: You can strive for more without hating where or who you are. You can want growth without rejecting the present version of yourself. You can admire the beasts on your feed and still know that your path, your fight, is valid even if it doesn’t come with a six-figure book deal or a Navy SEAL resume.

This isn’t a call to settle. I hate that word. I never want to stop reaching. But reaching with clarity is different than reaching with delusion. Knowing yourself means knowing the rhythms that work for you. The sacrifices you’re truly willing to make. The ones you’re not. It means asking yourself why you want what you say you want, and whether that desire is rooted in truth or comparison.

“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

– Voltaire

Some days, “good” is good enough. And if you stack enough of those days, you might just wake up one morning and realize that the life you built, not the one you borrowed from someone else, is the one worth fighting for.

And that’s not settling.

That’s running your own race, at your own pace.