60% of High Achievers Secretly Believe They're Broken

Source: My First Million | Published: 2026-09-18T13:15:08Z

Executive coach Joe Hudson, whose clients include Sam Altman, has found that the more you avoid an emotion, the stronger it gets — because the very behaviors you use to escape it end up feeding it.

The Moment You Lose Control Is the Most Valuable Signal of All

On day three of a ten-day silent meditation retreat, Joe Hudson had an eight-second experience.

He shifted his attention from his breath to his body, and suddenly felt every boundary dissolve — "I was one with everything, and everything was good." Then it was gone, leaving only eight seconds of aftershock. He said it felt like the first time someone shoots heroin. "My entire life changed. I didn't know what that was, but I was hooked."

At that point, he had only just started meditating. Before that, he'd had a mohawk, skateboarded, been expelled from his first college, gutted fish in Alaska, hitchhiked across America, worked in international securities lending, and played in a band. He watched his father grind away only to be consumed by corporate culture — and made a decision: not that path.

After those eight seconds, he lived on credit cards for seven years and meditated seven hours a day. That experience eventually made him who he is today — executive coach to Sam Altman, Erik Torenberg, Ev Williams, and a roster of top CEOs, and founder of Art of Accomplishment.

Self-Reliance Is a Childhood Survival Strategy

Hudson described on the podcast the most common personality pattern he encounters: the self-reliant type.

It usually starts in childhood — a harsh parent, an alcoholic father, a depressed mother. As a child, you learned one thing: no one is coming to take care of you, so you take care of yourself, and sometimes everyone else too. The pattern protected you. It kept you alive.

But carrying it into adulthood and into a company has consequences: you struggle to ask for help, struggle to clearly articulate what you want, harbor a complicated resistance to authority (neither trusting others' authority nor fully claiming your own), and find it nearly impossible to say "I'm hurt."

He says he can find traces of this pattern in almost any founder. Walk into a grocery store, can't find what you need — better to leave empty-handed than ask a clerk. "That's me," Sean laughed on the podcast. "We just didn't eat that night."

This isn't a character flaw. It's a strategy that once worked and no longer does, still running in the background.

The Emotion You're Running From Is the One Summoning You

Hudson calls this the "golden algorithm": the emotion you're avoiding gets reinforced by the very actions you take to avoid it.

Don't want to feel helpless in the grocery store, so you don't ask — and you leave with nothing, more helpless than before. Afraid the business is failing, so you work yourself into the ground — and your decision quality drops, your relationships suffer, and you feel even more helpless.

He says most people treat these emotions as threats to be eliminated, but that's the wrong direction. Emotions are more like a pipe — when water flows freely, life works; when the pipe gets kinked, problems surface everywhere. Suppressed anger either hardens into cold, controlling detachment ("I'm not angry, you just need to do your job") or an explosive outburst. But if you don't resist it, don't feel ashamed of it, what anger leaves behind — once it moves through — is clarity and boundaries. The kind of power Martin Luther King and Gandhi had.

The real solution isn't to eliminate emotion but to learn to be with it. Hudson put it in a way that's almost counterintuitive: "Fall in love with the emotion you're avoiding." Like training at the gym — you have to learn to enjoy the burn before you can actually progress.

Three Levels. Miss One and Nothing Changes

Most people's self-transformation happens at only one level: the intellectual. You know you should delegate. You know you should speak up. You know you should let go. And yet you don't.

Hudson breaks the human system into three layers: the prefrontal cortex (thinking/logic), the limbic system (emotion), and the reptilian brain/nervous system (instinctive response).

Knowing something is the easy part. Most people know they should exercise more. They're not exercising more. For real change, you need to address it emotionally too — find the feeling you've been avoiding, and learn to coexist with it. The nervous system layer is the slowest and most stubborn of all.

He used his mother as an example. She was an extremely strict German woman who loved him, but "five minutes early is on time." So even today, if he's a minute late to a podcast recording, his nervous system fires — despite it being completely irrelevant. This isn't a belief. It isn't an emotion. It's body memory.

Training the nervous system offers no single epiphany. The method is: whenever you feel it activate, pause for two seconds, simply notice "what state am I in right now," and keep going. Don't try to control it — trying to control anxiety is itself a source of anxiety. Just notice, again and again.

Avoiding Conflict Means Avoiding Progress

Hudson uses just two metrics to assess organizational health: how quickly difficult conversations are raised, and how quickly they're resolved.

He shared an internal example from his own company: someone wanted to give a facilitator feedback that their work wasn't up to standard, and the team was debating whether to route it through a manager instead of going directly. They decided to go direct. His reasoning: if the facilitator is genuinely underperforming, direct feedback improves the business. If the person giving the feedback is operating from arrogance, that arrogance itself needs to be addressed. Either way, avoidance lets the problem compound.

Conflict is the system signaling "there's efficiency to be gained here" — like a fault alarm on a factory floor. Ignore it, and the machine still breaks. You just won't know where.

On how to actually open these conversations, he offered some specific guidance: don't solve the problem for them ("just make more calls"); let them propose the solution ("sales are down — bring me a plan by tomorrow"). Ask questions first, genuinely understand their situation. Then say how you feel: "I've noticed I no longer trust that this will get done. That's uncomfortable for me. I know it's uncomfortable for you too. How do we fix this?"

Giving the problem back to them while owning your own state is far more effective than pointing fingers.

Negative Self-Talk Is Always Wrong

Hudson holds a position that sounds radical: all negative self-talk is wrong.

He lists the common forms. The most obvious is direct attack: "You screwed up. How could you be so stupid?" Slightly more covert is the driver: "You have to do this, you have to do that, don't forget, move." And there's a version disguised as encouragement: "You can do it, come on, you've got this." He points out that you would never say to Michael Jordan "come on, you can make this shot" — because that sentence implies you think he might not.

Changing negative self-talk isn't about trying to replace the voice. It's about changing your relationship to it. He suggests an experiment: for one day, every time the voice appears, respond to it in a single predetermined way — something like "oh, I see how scared you are," or "you say I screwed up? Show me," or simply "thank you, but I don't need this management style." Switch the response every two days and keep experimenting.

The core insight: your relationship with that voice can be changed. It isn't the truth. It's a habitual sound. And your response to it determines how much power it has.

A Common Contradiction Among High Achievers

Of the high performers Hudson has worked with, roughly 60 to 70 percent share the same internal architecture: on the surface, they feel more capable than most people; underneath, they believe they're fundamentally broken.

He describes this pattern without judgment. These are extraordinary people, and part of their drive comes precisely from this tension — they know they can do it, while constantly trying to prove they're not broken.

He's also noticed another common thread in fast-moving industries: very few top performers get stuck in loops of second-guessing themselves. When you're making dozens of decisions a day, the moment you enter a cycle of reversing yourself, everything grinds to a halt. Decisiveness isn't a personality trait — it's a survival requirement in high-velocity environments.

He adds that the struggles these top performers face are no different in nature from what's discussed in this conversation — limiting beliefs, self-reliance, negative self-talk, conflict avoidance. The stage is just bigger, and so are the consequences.

Visualizing the Worst Outcome Is How You Stop Being Controlled by It

Hudson has been married to his wife for 27 years, and he says during that time he has "married at least three different women." Both of them have changed significantly. When they've reached points where the relationship wasn't working, their approach wasn't to avoid it — it was to live through the worst outcome together.

They would sit down and seriously imagine divorce. Imagine how bad it would be. Feel the full devastation of it. Once they had lived through that worst-case scenario, they weren't afraid of it anymore. So when the real conversation happened, neither of them needed to perform. Neither had to walk a tightrope. They could say what they actually wanted.

He explained the mechanism on the podcast: what we're really afraid of isn't the thing itself — it's the emotional experience the thing would bring. If you can pre-experience that emotion, you discover it's survivable. I'm still here.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio provided the supporting framework in his 1994 book Descartes' Error: people with damage to the emotional centers of the brain show no change in intelligence but become nearly incapable of making decisions — choosing a pen color takes half an hour, deciding where to have lunch takes two hours. All decision-making involves emotion. That isn't a weakness. It's how the human system was designed.

The Real Definition of Efficiency Isn't Speed — It's Energy

Hudson offered an efficiency framework on the podcast that doesn't come up often.

A fast car and an efficient car are not the same thing. Fast means less time from A to B. Efficient means less energy consumed from A to B. Applied to people: at the end of the day, how much energy do you have left? Do you want to come back tomorrow?

People typically treat enjoyment as a reward — something you earn after the hard part. But enjoyment, he argues, is a condition for the system to function, not a result of it. After a yoga class you love, you'll come back tomorrow. After one you hate, you'll need willpower — and willpower has limits.

This extends to the question of figuring out what you like doing. He doesn't think this is a problem to be solved. It's a question to keep returning to in daily life: how can I enjoy this 10% more today? Not by changing the conditions — just by being a little more present in the experience.

He recommends a one-week experiment: for this week, only do things you enjoy. When he ran this himself, he spent one afternoon sitting next to his trash can, staring at a bag of rancid garbage. He didn't want to take it out — but he also didn't want to smell it. He realized he had to find a way to make taking out the trash bearable, even enjoyable. That's what the experiment is designed to surface: how many things are we "telling ourselves we have to endure" that could actually be different?

The Thing You Wouldn't Sell

Hudson and his wife were sitting together at the end of a long retreat, and he asked her a question: "If someone offered you a billion dollars on the condition that you could never do this thing again, would you take it?"

Both of them were quiet for a moment. Then they shook their heads.

He told the story to his daughter. Two or three months later, she came to him and said: "I found my billion-dollar idea." He assumed she meant a startup that could be worth a billion dollars. She said: "No. The thing I wouldn't be willing to sell."

He says that operating from motives like "I need to succeed," "I need money," "I need to win" doesn't mean you can't build a great company — but those motives don't produce fulfillment. The things you do because they're worth doing in themselves are the ones that might, someday, let you lean back and feel like it mattered.