'Only I protect me' — how The Courage to Be Disliked handed me back the steering wheel

“If I’d quit halfway, I shouldn’t have started.”

When I first started building side projects in earnest, there was a moment late one night, mid-code, when I asked myself something:

— Do I actually intend to finish this?

And what came back from inside me was a sentence that still sits in the center of my head:

“If I were going to quit halfway, I shouldn’t have started in the first place.”

That probably reads as slightly extreme. But both the job change and the side project turned out heavier than I had pictured — which is exactly why whether I had truly chosen them would, later, become the spine that held me up.

Over the next three articles I’m walking through The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga — for me, a bible — because it built that spine. This first article is about the book’s central frame: teleology.

I used to live by other people’s eyes

In my student years, I cared a lot about how I was perceived.

How to come across as a “proper person.” Choosing words so no one would think anything strange. A polite, conflict-free posture. Looking back, I was presenting a diluted version of myself — scared to put either my strengths or my flaws on the table.

At some point, that posture changed. The hinge was a single realization:

“The person evaluating me is someone else. No matter how well I move, that doesn’t mean their evaluation will be good. So expecting it in the first place was the mistake.”

The moment I gave up trying to win an evaluation, I gave myself permission to show up as myself.

(This “evaluation is someone else’s task” lives in the book as a separate concept — the separation of tasks — which I’ll write up tomorrow.)

”Because of the past” vs. “what am I choosing right now?”

The thinking at the center of The Courage to Be Disliked is teleology:

Past causes do not determine present feelings and behavior. We deploy past events as “causes” in service of a present goal.

Read straight, that sounds almost cruel. When we feel “I’m like this because of X that happened,” the book insists what’s actually going on is that the current me who doesn’t want to change needs that past event to stay where I am.

When I was stepping into the job change and side-project work, I caught my own mind starting these sentences over and over:

• “My current job is too busy, so I can’t study.”
• “I have prior experience, so I don’t need to push.”
• “That manager shut me down once, so I shouldn’t say new things.”

Each is grammatically defensible. But every time I re-read this book, I saw them clearly: those sentences were tools for protecting the current me who is choosing not to change. The past won’t move. The only thing that moves is what I choose right now.

Where I landed: “Only I protect me”

Going through that job change and side project, I crystallized a belief I now hold pretty firmly. I know it sounds a bit extreme.

The only person who protects me is me.

For example: if my company’s evaluation came back unfairly low without a coherent explanation. The old me might have asked them to reconsider, made a case, requested a re-evaluation. The current me, in most cases, doesn’t. I quietly start preparing the next move.

To be clear, this is not “if my evaluation isn’t high, I quit.” If the evaluation comes with a reasoning I can follow — even one I personally disagree with — I take it in. Differences of viewpoint or context are valid and expected. What pushes me to move is the absence of room for explanation or dialogue: the sense that no amount of effort on my side will change how I’m treated here.

Not resentment, not resignation. Evaluation is their task — I can’t move the task itself. My task is just the choice between staying here or moving on. That’s mine.

The inverse happened too: I once received a promotion I hadn’t been angling for. Pleasant — but structurally the same. A result of someone else’s task happened to land favorably for me. That’s all it is. Once you stop letting “evaluation” (someone else’s task) yank you around, the world goes quiet. And inside that quiet, I can focus on the only question that’s actually mine: what am I choosing for myself?

”You are choosing to be who you are right now.”

A line in the book’s dialogue section:

“You are choosing to be who you are right now.”

The first time I read this, I bristled. “No I’m not — circumstances are forcing this.”

After coming through those two big choices — job change, side project — I re-read it and the weight had changed. Yes. I am, right now, choosing. Staying or moving. Writing a blog post or not. All of it. And the consequences come back to me, not to anyone else.

That’s heavy. But it’s also the philosophy that hands the steering wheel of life back to your own hands.

Asking myself the same question I ask the team

When a team member says “I can’t move because of X,” I don’t push back. I ask, quietly:

“Is there a piece here where you’re choosing not to change? If so, what is it you’re protecting right now?”

Not a rejection — a question that returns the steering wheel to them. I keep aiming the same question at myself. Write the post or not. Try something or not. Say the honest thing or swallow it. Each one — I’m choosing, right now, right here.

Once you own that, “the only person who protects me is me” stops being extreme. It just turns out to be the quietest, most honest shape of living I’ve found so far.

Summary

• The Courage to Be Disliked rejects causality as the explanation for current suffering and proposes a teleological read
• “Because of that boss” / “because I’m too busy” is a tool for protecting a self that’s currently choosing not to change
• The moment you stop expecting “evaluation” (someone else’s task), you give yourself permission to show up as yourself
• “The only person who protects me is me” isn’t extreme — it’s the stance that hands the steering wheel back to you
• The same question works on the team, and on myself: “what are you choosing, right now?”

Tomorrow, I’ll dig into the concept I only touched on today — the separation of tasks — and what happens on the ground when you actually stop expecting an evaluation.

Related Articles

• Thinking 101 — Fluency, Confirmation Bias, and the Opposite Question — The trap of collecting evidence only for the conclusion you’ve already reached
• A manager’s job is asking, not answering — Turning “what are you choosing right now?” into a question
• Failure Science — life is too short to experience every failure firsthand — Treating past failure as material rather than as cause