A Personal Blog
by Bob Knotts, Founder of the Humanity Project
This is highly unusual, to say the least. The Humanity Project does not exist to promote the work of me or any other individual. It exists to help others, especially to instill our three core values of respect for the equal value of every individual along with an appreciation of diversity and the need for self-worth. But we’re making an exception here — for a good reason. My new book deals directly with those very topics and others that relate to the Humanity Project’s work as well as my reasons for founding this nonprofit in the first place.
So we hope you may want to read my 25th and latest book: “Beyond Me: Dissecting Ego To Find The Innate Love At Humanity’s Core (A New Psychology As Philosophy).” Here’s a link to the Amazon book page offering “Beyond Me”: Visit the Amazon page for “Beyond Me.”
Let me give you a small sample of this highly unconventional and lengthy book. This is a short section from Chapter 1:
“ … Over the years I noticed that my self-doubts caused me many many many problems in the world. You will read about some of those too. Unhealthy relationships, destructive reactions, irrational judgments that bubbled up from my relentless confusions about Bob, the who and the what of me. I also observed that my problems frequently twisted themselves into problems for other people, from family to friends to colleagues to strangers. Things I said or didn’t say to them, things I did or didn’t do. My obsession with me created most of the damage that I inflicted upon both myself and my fellow human beings. The older I got, the clearer this became to me.
And over the years I noticed that you suffered precisely the same misery, whoever you were. The details didn’t matter much. As best I could surmise after travels on six continents, every other you on the planet also suffered from it. In this way you each were pretty much like me. Meaning it was all ‘me’ nearly all the time for everyone of us. The daily pursuit of immediate self-interest, the anxieties and fears and angers that emerged from our individual doubts, the desperation for outside appreciation, the harm to ourselves and others when the appreciation didn’t come. Every individual at the center of their personal universe.
Oh yes, I concluded, this is human nature. Clearly just the way we are.
Except that it isn’t.”
In a nutshell, this is the essence of “Beyond Me.” Over the course of 600 pages, the book argues that our destructive self-centered ways, our egocentrism, isn’t natural but rather learned — and can be unlearned. And untaught to our children. Instead, “Beyond Me” says, there is an innate core of love in human beings … but not the kind of love most people think about when they hear that word. The book explains in empirically based detail the what, why and how of all this. If you read it, you’ll see what I mean.
You can find another sample to read at this link, something a bit longer: Read the opening pages of “Beyond Me.”
Ultimately, “Beyond Me” is an enormously hopeful view of our humanity, offering new perspectives and new solutions to many of our problems. And much like the Humanity Project itself, the book stresses that each individual is equally valuable — and the human species is uniquely significant. By the time you read the whole book, I feel sure, you are likely to have a different, more optimistic view of yourself, others and our world.
