To be happy and achieve your personal and professional goals, you need to love yourself and accept who you are with all your strengths and weaknesses. You need to accept yourself the way you did when you were a child, before your ego developed and you began comparing and competing with other people, convinced that being yourself wasn’t good enough.

Why isn’t being you good enough? Who else can you be if you aren’t yourself? And can you be anyone else even if you wanted to?

Since you obviously can’t be anyone else but yourself, why not be happy with who you are and live your life to the fullest? Why not celebrate your uniqueness, make the most of all those remarkable qualities that have come together to make you who you are, and strive to be the best version of yourself? When you accept yourself the way you are, the good as well as the not-so-good, you are:

With self-love and self-acceptance, you don’t look to others to decide how you should live your life, but turn inwards and listen to your inner voice. You pursue your own dreams and desires rather than the dreams and desires of others, and you achieve your own unique purpose.

Instead of comparing and competing with others, you compare and compete with your own self. You learn from your mistakes and try to get better and better so that you can maximize your potential and reach the summit of your own life.

So why not be yourself? As Oscar Wilde said so wisely: “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”