Why do I keep sabotaging my own success?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau teaches that when you call successful and rich people greedy, “your brain gets trained to it. It takes notes.” You're not unlucky, he says. “You trained your brain to hate success.”
Your brain has one job: to keep you safe from bad things. So be careful what you teach it. When you say success makes people miserable, your brain writes it down. Then, when you get close to winning, it does its job and pulls you back, quietly and subconsciously: the missed deadline, the “I'll start Monday” again, the chance you talk yourself out of.
That's not bad luck, he explains. It's your brain protecting you from the very thing you taught it to fear. The Sages already said, “Hakin'ah motzi'ah es ha'adam min ha'olam,” envy removes a person from the world. Envy doesn't just resent success; it teaches your mind to reject it.
So ask yourself: what is the word you would never let yourself become? Rich, powerful, ambitious? “You didn't fail to reach it, you trained yourself to hate it. So un-train it, or keep calling it bad luck.”
Related concepts: Mindset · Success
In A Soul at Peace: The Roadblocks We Build Ourselves
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
Self-sabotage often comes from training your own mind to see success as bad.
Fear, vulnerability, or tension
The brain's job is safety, so it quietly pulls you back from whatever you have labeled dangerous.
What may be behind it
In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that this inner defense system does not analyze or weigh things. It follows the orders you gave it through your own words and thoughts.
Deepest human truth
The way out is not a war against yourself but retraining: begin to speak about success as what it truly is, a vessel for serving Hashem and providing for your family.
More questions from this teaching
More answers: Wealth, Work, and Divine Sustenance · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz