On Hiring Yourself

Self-pity, endless doubt, and lurching from one goal to the next kill our dreams more surely than any outside circumstance.

How many times have we missed what we wanted — not because we couldn’t reach it, but because we started arguing with ourselves: dissecting every little thing, weighing the pros and cons forever, drowning in the swamp of our own inner monologue?

There’s a paradox worth noticing. Some traders steadily grow their clients’ capital, yet lose money trading their own. The students of certain mentors, following the advice to the letter, start earning more than the teachers themselves — who are still stuck in the agony of choice.

In our own lives, we are both the manager and the worker at once. When these roles tangle together and no one has drawn the lines of responsibility, chaos sets in. But separate them — and a lot gets simpler. The manager analyzes, visualizes, sets the strategy and the direction, assigns the tasks, and takes on the risk. The worker doesn’t philosophize — he does the work. He asks no “why?”, doesn’t dwell on how hard it all is, and looks for no excuses.

At any moment you can ask yourself: “Which role am I in right now?” The manager doesn’t care about the exact method or the small details. The worker, in the best sense, “switches off his brain” and acts. The decision, after all, has already been made.

That’s it. We’ve signed a contract with ourselves. Vadim Zeland called it “renting yourself out.”

At times I meet “sugar” people — they seem to melt at the first drops of sweat under any load. In others, everything inside screams: “What if it doesn’t work out?” — and they stop. Our ideal worker operates as if he were hired with no right to fail: no self-pity, no wavering, no “what if.” When he walks into hard negotiations, he’s no longer hemmed in by his fears — he just follows the brief.

I found a great analogy in working with AI systems. I frame the task, describe the inputs, the context, the constraints, the end result — and the process kicks off. The system doesn’t whine, doesn’t get scared, doesn’t put things off. It just does. All I do is give feedback, course-correct, add detail where needed. And in the end — the task is done. It’s strikingly close to that inner tandem of “manager and worker” we can grow within ourselves.

May we all become our own perfect pair: a wise manager and a relentless worker. A union like that will carry us to the highest peaks! 😎