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The Art of Accomplishment

What is Selfishness?

The Art of Accomplishment

Brett Kistler

Business, Education, Personal Development, Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Management, Self-improvement

4.9275 Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Much of the work that we do in this podcast centers around defining our needs and desires — living into our own self interest, while loving it and trusting it as good. This can conflict with some of the programming that we have gotten from parents and society, which tells us that we should strive for selflessness and avoid selfishness. But what if self interest has the power to lead us to a more refined understanding of what makes us happy? In this episode, we will dive into the distinction between healthy self interest and what society calls selfishness.

Transcript

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0:00.0

All self-interest, it seems, leads if you allow it to.

0:05.6

It leads to a more refined understanding of what makes us happy.

0:11.7

Welcome to the art of accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others

0:16.6

leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease.

0:20.5

I'm Brett Kisler, here today with my co-host, Joe Hudson.

0:28.1

So a lot of the work that we do in these courses has been around finding our wants,

0:33.2

finding our needs and our wants and asking for what we want and getting what we want

0:36.8

and just really living into our own self-interest and loving it and trusting it as good.

0:42.0

And a lot of this seems to conflict with a lot of a programming that we've gotten from parenting

0:47.0

or from society around selfishness and not being selfish and being selfless.

0:53.2

And I'm curious to dive into in this episode the line,

0:57.0

if there is a line, between healthy self-interest and what we call selfishness. How do you define

1:03.8

selfishness? I have probably a pretty ludicrous definition of it, but it's what your parents told you you were when they wanted

1:14.8

you to do something else. I think that's really what selfishness is. Every time I've watched a

1:20.5

parent call somebody selfish and then, you know, they become adults and then they think they're

1:25.5

selfish. It's always because the parent wants them to do something else and so,

1:29.8

or they're not doing what they want, right?

1:31.6

So it's almost a projection of selfishness from the parent.

1:36.1

To even call your kids selfish is a selfish act, you know,

1:41.3

and if you're defining it the same way, because a kid's whole job is to

1:46.9

learn how to assert their will and to get their wants and needs met. And of course, like,

1:53.0

there's no two-year-old who's like, let me think about world peace. The two-year-old's like,

...

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