"Before You Dress It Up, You’ve Got to Clean It Up!
There are a lot of successful people in this world who wonder why they still feel empty. To try and fill the void, they figure they should make a few more million, maybe buy a bigger house or a few more cars, etc. All those things just dress up the emptiness.
For me, I wasn’t even successful. I was just fucking empty. So how I dressed it up was by hiding my insecurities and fucked up life - shit, I just flat out hid! I kept wondering why whenever I faced hard obstacles I didn’t have the substance to fight through difficult times.
In life it is important to attack the inside of ourselves.... you can have money, fame, good looks, etc., and still feel empty as fuck inside. The emptiness comes from not truly liking yourself. This is why we try to dress it up!
The world made me a turd. Being abused by my father growing up, not being very good at school, having low self-esteem but faking it, etc, I tried on many costumes to hide the real me but, I finally learned at the end of the day, we all have to face the harsh reality - you can’t dress up a turd!
The only way to fill that emptiness is by going to war with yourself. You have to come to a point in your life where you like yourself enough to realize that you don’t need much at all to be truly successful.
Sometimes you fill those voids in your life in the strangest and most surprising ways but you never find that out until you have done the hard work. It’s like cooking a turkey on Thanksgiving... some inexperienced people dress the turkey and start cooking it not realizing that before you dress it, you need to clean that motherfucker out! The same thing applies to our lives- don’t start dressing yourself with material possessions before you spend the time going to war with yourself and conquering your inner-demons!"
(David Goggins)