Who Are You Without the Mask? How to Stop Playing a Role and Become Yourself

AVAlexander Volchek

To seem better. For example, someone works as a taxi driver and says, “I'm not really a taxi driver. I have a business.” This is very common—Sasha is sitting here laughing. “It's really common here.” Yes. Here too, right? “No, in Silicon Valley.” You mean that funny thing in Silicon Valley, where every taxi driver has a startup? “I'm not a taxi driver. I actually have a startup.” A person tries to seem like someone else, to speak differently. Above all, again, they want to seem better. Notice that if someone driving a taxi says they are not a taxi driver, that they have a business, to many people they will begin to seem worse, not better. Many people don't understand that: they don't seem better. When a person tries not to be themselves, they don't simply want to be better. They actually become someone other than who they are. As soon as they become someone other than who they are, they have lost. They have lost enormously. And they have lost because—again, they have lost for two reasons.

First, they have stopped developing, because someone who does not live their own life is defeated from the outset and will live in great suffering. Someone who does not want to acknowledge or be themselves, does not want to live their own life. And second, they have lost because they set out to be, to seem better, but other people actually formed some opinion of them. “How do I understand who I am if it seems to me that I've spent my whole life playing—” Yes, if you ask yourself that question... I just told you that you are constantly trying to play the role of someone else in front of other people, to look better so people will think better of you. And you say, “How do I understand who I really am?” Those are different tasks. First, you simply need to stop manipulating other people and stop pretending to be someone else. When you ask how to understand who you are, you are again trying to avoid yourself. Look, you are saying, “I am someone who manipulates in front of other people and wants to be better or different. I don't want them to know who I really am.”

At the same time, you say, “How can I stop doing this if I don't know who I am?” I am telling you that when you frame it as not knowing who you are, and therefore supposedly being unable to stop manipulating other people, you are again trying to create the illusion of a different person. You are trying to say right away, “Let's all agree from the start that I don't actually know who I am, and my behavior isn't me.” Essentially, you don't need to tell anyone who you are. Each person will still have their own feeling, Sasha, their own impression of you. Some will judge by your appearance, your style, the structure of your face, how you speak or move. Some will look at your mind or your professional qualities. Others will see your heredity, your karmic experience or your behavior toward other people. Everyone will make their own assessment, everyone will see something of their own, Sasha. Some people assess others by how they behave toward other people.

Knowing this, people manipulate. I was in Las Vegas last week. I walked up to an elevator and stood waiting, and two men and a woman came up behind me. The men had a very distinctive appearance. Many people would probably have avoided them based on their looks. They came up and stood rather brashly at the elevator entrance. I was completely calm. I always notice who lets whom go first. I always let people go ahead myself. I notice who arrived when. It is automatic for me. Some people don't even notice or know about this. The doors opened, and one of the men turned to me and said, “Please, go ahead. You were here first.” It is interesting: you look at someone and form a certain image, and at that moment they shatter it, showing you, “I was thinking about that too.” You feel as if they are reading your thoughts. I wasn't thinking he was a bad person. I wasn't forming an opinion about him, but he still had a certain visual image, perhaps even a slightly gangster-like one.

He turns to you and says, “Go ahead.” It is as if he has read your thoughts and is showing you, “Listen, you aren't the only one paying attention to what is happening here.” It turns out that I was forming an image based on a certain model of the person, their behavior, including how they approached the elevator, but he had no intention of offending me. And when I entered the elevator, do you know what happened? The woman with them looked very respectable. She was probably around fifty and had a very dignified appearance. She turned to me and said, “Please excuse us.” She was apologizing for their group. They fell silent. Before that, they had been talking very animatedly. They might simply not have noticed me. That is natural. All three of them fell silent, Sasha. All three, to show respect, as though they might have acted inappropriately and intruded on the space. That was what they wanted to convey. But I said, “Oh, absolutely not. It's quite all right. There isn't any issue at all.” When we were in the elevator, I let them get out first, and they left calmly, paying no further attention to me.

It is interesting when you find yourself among people who open doors for one another. Everyone is trying to open the door for everyone else, right? You don't know where to go. This morning, an elderly woman opened a door for me in Los Altos, in Silicon Valley. She often has coffee at the same café and recognizes me. She is probably almost eighty. In principle, I shouldn't just walk out without holding the door. Somehow, with my cup, I half-held the door and insisted that she go through first. Though it would have been perfectly normal, respectful and fine if I had gone through appropriately myself. Recently, someone letting me pass said, “I insist that you go first.” An adult. It is an interesting point. I want to show that people form opinions of others according to different criteria. We are sitting in a public place filming a video. Someone might think, “Oh, a famous person is making a video.” Someone else might think, “Look at those assholes filming in a public place.” Just from seeing us filming here with the guys.

Someone else might not. Someone may consider it disrespectful: “Why are you filming in a place that should be peaceful?” Someone might think we are talking loudly. Another might wonder what language we are speaking. Someone might look at how we are dressed, how we look or how we behave. Others won't think anything at all, won't even notice that we are filming. Each person will have an entirely different perception. We think many people remember things, patterns of behavior, qualities, what we did. In reality, they may not even notice. What we think matters to another person has no significance at all. This is an interesting subject when discussing my wife. We live in a world where everyone earns huge amounts of money, the technology sector and all that. My wife has absolutely no interest in the professional technology sector. When we meet people somewhere, everyone expects a particular pattern of behavior. She isn't interested in any of that, and she will form an entirely different impression, reach an entirely different conclusion about people. And people will form an entirely different impression of her.

The subject you are asking about is very interesting. If you realize that you are constantly trying to seem like someone else to other people, then, of course, a process begins in which you become aware of it. This is a very interesting point you are raising. At some point, you begin to realize that you don't know yourself. The more you want to seem like someone else in front of other people, the less you know yourself, the less you understand who you are, who you are at all. What are you doing in this life? Why are you living it? A person's main task is to get to know themselves, know their own causes and effects, understand themselves. That is a person's main task. It is what will open your eyes. But there is no need to rush here. First, you need to stop constructing illusions and a different image of yourself for other people. First, stop doing that. Studying yourself is a separate, fundamentally enormous task: getting to know yourself, understanding yourself, expanding your conception of yourself. First of all, it will take your whole life. It cannot be solved in a minute. It will take your whole life. But you certainly need to stop manipulating other people.

There is a very good exercise for this. I have described it in many videos. Anyone who has watched many of my videos will write, “I know this exercise.” Tell me: have you done it? Do you know it? For your development in life, you could focus on this exercise alone. It is—

—for your development in life. The exercise is this: every evening, spend five minutes reflecting on how you treated other people during the day. From the heart, with joy, with respect, without manipulation? Or did you relate to others in order to get something from them, use them or gain something? If you want to change another person's opinion of you, if you want to change it, that means you want to use that person. Sasha, you understand that, right? If you want to change someone else's opinion of you, you want to use them. This is important. You don't simply want to be different. Someone who tries to change another person's opinion of them, who wants to be someone else or seem like someone else, wants to use that other person. They want something from them. That is a problem. How do you live through that state? What do you experience toward other people? Ask those questions; I will answer them. Write comments. I will be sure to answer them here or direct you to other material. I discuss this on my Telegram channel, on Instagram and here on YouTube.

I certainly discuss it in my V100 development group. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel and like this video. It is very useful to me, and I truly need it.