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It is important to peel back your brain layers to see if there’s something that motivates you to think this way. You may feel on a subconscious level that you don’t deserve good things in life, but you’re just making that up without realizing it. My father, one of the greatest professional bowlers of all time (don’t mean to brag, ladies), fell into such a spiral of despair in his thirties because of some horrible happenstance—namely the deaths of two sons—that he developed the following association: When good things happen, bad things happen shortly after. It was because of this destructive yet false polarity that he lost his passion for the game at which he was so good and retired at thirty-four.

Here’s a related joke: Two Irish Catholics are on a cliff watching the sunset. As the sky spills a palette of reds and oranges around the fiery orb, they quickly realize that it is absolutely the most beautiful sunset they or possibly anyone has ever seen. They stare at it in awe for several moments until one finally turns to the other and says, “Oh, we’re gonna pay for this one!” Look, good things happen and bad things happen. They’re usually not connected in some kind of unholy marriage of crap. It’s a fallacy but one that is fairly common. So what is it? It’s a form of self-sabotage. It could stem from an erroneous association, like in my father’s case, or maybe its roots go back generations. As someone who attended an all-boys Catholic school, I love the Irish Catholic reference in the aforementioned joke because Catholicism operates heavily on an economy of guilt. Jews know this, too. I’m sure fifteen hundred years ago, when religion and politics and science were all the same thing, the people in power realized that it was better to keep the masses from striving for greatness and upsetting that balance of power, so they taught them that aiming too high would anger the Lord. “Who would ever want to anger the wizard that created us? We’d better keep our heads low and stay evenly within the median. In fact, I should probably flagellate myself for even entertaining any ideas of getting ahead.” [whipping sounds] This is still ingrained in our emotional DNA. But it’s foolish, and hopefully the mere fact that you are aware of it will help dissipate its evil grasp on your soul.

Think about it: Why don’t you deserve good things in life? Why shouldn’t you have everything you want? Material wealth, for example, is a man-made concept. If you were to step back to the edge of the solar system, next to poor, downgraded Pluto, you would quickly see that it has no real positive or negative value in the universe. If you make shit-tons of money, just as one example, the Universe doesn’t really care one way or the other. And don’t think that I’m saying money is everything. It isn’t, if you don’t care about it. Do you want spiritual wealth? GREAT. Familial wealth? START MAKIN’ BABIES! You need to determine whatever it is that’s important to you before you can start tackling why you aren’t getting it.

Maybe there’s another possibility as to why things aren’t going your way: You’re a control freak. If you put yourself and your work out there even a little in this world, chances are that you’re going to get rejected a percentage of the time. Those are just the odds. One way to look at it is that if you’re not getting rejected a bunch, you may not be trying to innovate. When we get rejected it feels like the rug gets ripped out from underneath us, or like we’re in an earthquake—we feel helpless and out of control. Naturally, it would be easy to assume that we’re going to fail, so that we don’t have to feel helpless. I bet you think: “At least I feel like I have control if I assume things are going to turn out shitty, so why fuckin’ bother?” We might even start going there merely because it’s a familiar, comfortable place, similar to how someone might stay in an abusive relationship.

Try playing chess with an ape. He opens with the classic e2-e4 but you choose to use the Pirc Defense. He hadn’t counted on this. In a fit of