In recent decades, the fields of psychology and personal development have become increasingly focused on the importance of self-love and self-compassion. The basic idea is that if people can learn to fully accept, forgive and appreciate themselves, they will experience greater wellbeing and their problems will largely take care of themselves.
Self-help books preach the gospel of radical self-acceptance. Therapists urge their clients to be kinder to themselves. Yoga classes end with the instructor guiding students to look in the mirror and repeat “I love you.” On the surface, loving yourself seems like an undeniably positive thing. What could be wrong with that?
As it turns out, quite a lot. For many people struggling with motivation, shame or life dissatisfaction, the modern mania for self-love misses the mark entirely. Not only does all this narcissistic navel-gazing fail to lead to positive change, it can actually be counterproductive and harmful.
This article will explore the potential downsides of the self-love movement and present an alternate approach to motivation and growth based on the concept of grit. While self-acceptance has its place, developing grit through challenge, hardship and perseverance is often the true path to building a life you can be proud of.
The Downside of Self-Love
To understand why self-love advice rings hollow for so many people, let’s look at some of the issues with it:
It Invalidates People’s Actual Experience
Imagine you’re an overweight, lonely man who feels ashamed of where he is in life. You’ve been struggling with depression and lack of motivation for years. In a moment of courage, you decide to see a therapist and share honestly how you feel about yourself.
“I’m extremely unhappy with who I am and how I live. I feel pathetic, useless and embarrassed about my weight and lack of romantic relationships. I spend most days at home by myself looking at social media and feeling envy towards people who seem to have it all figured out. I hate myself for wasting so much time and potential.”
In response, the therapist looks at you with a sage smile and says “It sounds like you’re being very cruel and judgmental towards yourself. You need to learn to practice self-love and self-forgiveness. You are a human being worthy of love exactly as you are.”
While the therapist may have good intentions, this advice completely invalidates your experience. Essentially, it boils down to “You shouldn’t feel the way you do.” It ignores the real emotional truth behind your shame and dissatisfaction. Telling someone to self-love away legitimate unhappiness is facile, unsympathetic and frankly insulting.
Negative Emotions Often Exist For a Reason
It’s important to understand that emotions like shame, anger, envy and sadness often serve an important purpose. They act as signals that something in our life needs to change. For example:
– Feeling angry and violated after someone robs you pushes you to take actions like installing security measures.
– Feeling ashamed of being 50 pounds overweight motivates you to finally go on that diet.
– Feeling sad after a breakup inspires self-reflection about what went wrong.
Negative emotions provide the impulse we need to make difficult but necessary improvements in our lives. They energize and direct us towards positive change.
If therapists encourage clients to simply “have compassion for their feelings” without doing anything to resolve the underlying issue, all that motivation gets bottled up. Negative patterns continue unabated. Any push towards growth gets neutralized under a blanket of what often amounts to intellectualized complacency.
This approach is especially detrimental for men. Male socialization centers on taking concrete action to solve problems. Men going through a crisis do not want to be told to make peace with their failings. They want strategies to improve their situation. Self-love reads as indulgent navel-gazing that avoids responsibility.
It Removes an Important Motivational Force
Perhaps the biggest pitfall of the self-love movement is that it removes one of the most powerful motivational forces in human life: the desire for self-improvement. People stuck in a painful job or a failing relationship don’t necessarily want to make peace with that situation. What they want is the motivation and direction to make a positive change.
Likewise, people who already hate themselves do not want to learn how to self-love. What they want is to develop discipline, summon motivation and build a life they can feel proud of. As one frustrated man put it: “I don’t need to live in a bubble of stupid aphorisms. I need someone to kick my ass.”
Unfortunately, modern psychology offers little for people who want actual life changes rather than inner emotional acceptance. Therapists are trained to focus entirely on discussing feelings, not taking action to accomplish concrete goals.
If a client says they want to find a partner, the therapist will never address that goal directly or offer advice. The subject always gets reframed as “Let’s talk about why you feel this way…”
After years of navel-gazing in therapy, people often end up right where they started – stuck in unfulfilling patterns. All the motivation that came from self-judgment and negative emotion slowly gets drained away.
For people who already feel demoralized and aimless, being told to self-love can be the completely wrong approach. It frequenly amounts to “Stop wanting to change” or “Don’t feel bad about failing” or “Make peace with mediocrity.” That turns therapeutic work into an exercise in complacency training rather than positive transformation.
The Power of Grit
Luckily, recent psychological research has identified an alternate path for people who don’t resonate with the self-love and self-compassion mantra. This alternate path centers on developing grit.
Grit is defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Gritty people stay committed to their aims over years or decades, despite setbacks, roadblocks, dry periods and crises along the way.
In a landmark 2007 study, psychologist Angela Duckworth found grit was a better predictor of success than IQ in domains like:
– Educational achievement among students
– Retention during military officer training
– Rank attainment and graduation rates at West Point military academy
– Sales productivity among wholesalers
– Final ranking in the National Spelling Bee
Essentially, grit emerged as one of the most powerful determinants of achievement in any difficult sphere where sustainable effort over the long haul was required. Smart and talented people drop all the time. Gritty people persist.
Duckworth’s research caused a major shift in psychology. Being gifted suddenly seemed less important than being gritty. This opened up a whole new pathway for people who want to accomplish great things but don’t consider themselves innate geniuses. With grit, you can go farther than the gifted.
Cultivating Grit Through Adversity
If grit is so critical to achievement, how does one actually build it? Duckworth and other researchers have identified a primary mechanism: learning to endure adversity.
Places like military boot camps or elite athletic camps are laboratories for grit development. In these intense environments, recruits are constantly challenged past their normal limits, face frequent failure and criticism, and must bounce back again and again to keep going.
It is often the most challenging experiences in life that forge the most unbreakable grit. This may explain why so many veterans and athletes look back positively on their harsh training years. The adversity built up a resilience that has served them ever since.
On the surface, it seems counterintuitive that abusive boot camp instructors could inspire unshakable confidence. But there are a few key factors at play:
First, the criticism recruits receive is almost always about performance, not character. The message is: “You are failing at this job” rather than “You are a worthless failure.” This is a vital nuance.
Second, under the harshness lies a deeper message of belief in one’s potential. Recruits know that no matter how much they screw up, the instructors will keep working with them and won’t kick them out. They only leave if they choose to quit – the onus is put on their determination.
Third, there is an element of symbolic “death and rebirth.” In voluntarily undergoing intense challenge, the old self “dies” and from the flames emerges a new self that now knows: “Whatever world can throw at me, I can handle.”
Finally, grit grows from the act of getting up again after failing a thousand times. Failing no longer intimidates – it becomes the path itself. Each small step forward on an endless path makes you grittier.
This is not to say boot camps are the only way to build grit. But they demonstrate an approach grounded in stoicism, accountability and perseverance that directly contradicts the modern fixation on self-love and emotional comfort.
A Military Approach to Your Own Goals
You don’t need to join the military to harness the psychological lessons from boot camp and apply them to your own goals. Here are some ways to take a “military approach” in your own life:
Adopt a Growth Mindset. The first step is believing you can get better at anything with effort and persistence. Don’t let a lack of natural aptitude decide what you pursue and enjoy. Lean into challenges.
Set Clear Long-Term Goals. The grittiest people have life-long goals they chip away at day after day, year after year. Examples include starting a non-profit, running 50 marathons or mastering the piano. The timeline is infinite – that’s what makes it gritty.
Expect Adversity: Any long-term endeavor will involve failure, stagnation, frustration and crises. Expect adversity and see it as an opportunity to practice resilience. Don’t get demoralized. Soldier on.
Focus on Progress Over Outcomes: Outcomes are often out of your control. But you can control putting in focused effort every single day that incrementally builds skills, knowledge and experience. Make daily progress the benchmark.
Cultivate Realistic Optimism: There will be bleak times on the path when you feel demoralized and progress stalls. Gritty people respond to these periods with a steadfast optimistic belief that they will turn around if they hang in long enough and keep executing fundamentals.
Support Yourself: Even when you fail repeatedly and feel hopeless, talk to yourself with the firm compassion a drill sergeant would. Express disappointment but unfailing belief in your potential. Hold yourself accountable.
Celebrate Small Wins: Every step forward, no matter how small, is cause for celebration. This maintained a motivation and forward momentum even during the hardest slogs.
Learn From Military Psychology: Books like Grit by Angela Duckworth and Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink provide the military perspective on achievement through overcoming adversity.
Choose Goals That Align With Your Purpose
An important caveat is that grit for grit’s sake can lead to burnout and emptiness. You need goals fueled by a sense of purpose and meaning. Those goals often require the most perseverance but will fill you with passion and vitality.
Take time to consider what success really looks like for you. Is it money? Status? Fame? Often, authentic success has more to do with self-mastery, growth, and bringing kindness to the world. Maybe it’s becoming an incredible father. Or volunteering to help the unfortunate. Or overcoming social anxiety to form meaningful friendships.
When your goals are tied to your deepest values, you tap into infinite motivational energy. Small steps forward feel incredibly fulfilling because they reinforce your sense of purpose. Each incremental improvement is proof you are living your truth.
That’s not to say you can’t have conventional goals like career achievements or athletic milestones. But make sure these align with, rather than distract from, your core mission. Great grit comes when you pursue outer success from a foundation of inner purpose.
Conclusion
Self-love and self-compassion absolutely have their place, especially for people overcoming trauma or abuse. But don’t force yourself down that path if it doesn’t resonate.
If you are dissatisfied with life and desire concrete growth, grit may be the missing ingredient you need. Structure your life like a military boot camp. Set audacious goals tied to your deeper purpose and values.
Embrace hardship and failure as necessary steps on the path to mastery. Celebrate small daily progress. Talk to yourself with firm compassion. Let temporary setbacks forge you into someone unbreakable.
With consistent grit, remarkable transformation follows. You build the life you want not by learning to love yourself as you are now, but by refusing to quit until you become someone worth loving.
