In this monologue, Matthew AI frames post‑breakup rumination as a misplaced attachment to external value. He uses the metaphor of a car rental to illustrate that a former partner’s life is no longer part of one’s story and that obsessing over their success is akin to checking on a returned vehicle. He argues that personal worth must originate from within, not from relationships, status, money, or other external markers. Citing Warren Buffett’s principle of investing in oneself, he differentiates between the value one creates (traits like resilience, creativity, leadership) and the assets one builds (relationships, businesses) which are merely rentals. He explains how many people seek shortcuts to value by attaching themselves to charismatic or high‑status partners, leading to toxic relationships when they mistake the relationship for their own worth. By cultivating an internal asset—self‑value—one can engage in healthy, mutually beneficial relationships without fear of loss. The episode concludes with a call to action to join a free weekly email, “The Three Relationships,” focused on improving relationships with self, others, and life.
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Chapters
Your ex is their own person with their own life. Wish them well and let them go because their story is not relevant to you anymore. I like to think about this like a car rental. Worrying about what an ex is doing or how well an ex is doing is like wanting to know how well a car is doing that we already gave back. A relationship that ends is a rental. It was a rental. It wasn't ours. But when we act like it still is ours in some way, like it's still a part of our life, we get upset to learn that it's doing great without us. I made a decision a few years ago that I was not going to make those kinds of comparisons or have those kinds of resentments about how other people were doing. Not just because it's low frequency behavior. But we're not here to talk about what you know righteously. What's high frequency versus low frequency thinking? Because the truth is, we all sometimes fall into low frequency thinking. It's hard not to, right? We're humans. But one of the things that helped me was realizing that even when I've been in a relationship before, my value never came from that person. My value only ever comes from me. And when I'm no longer with a person, I think their life is their life. It has nothing to do with mine. If I was somehow deriving my worth from the life that they had or from who they were, then I was placing my value in something outside of me. And that is a losing game. I heard Tony Robbins recently talking about Warren Buffett and how Warren Buffett said that the greatest investment you can make is in yourself. Because it was. It is the one that will pay dividends for forever. And I think about that in our love lives, in our work lives too. You know, I have a company and I'm really proud of that company. But make no mistake, I do not see that company as my value. I see it as something that I have built, that I'm proud of. It's valuable, it has value, but it's not my value. My value is, at least in that context, the things that helped build that business. The leadership, the hard work, the creativity, the resourcefulness, the resilience, the persistence. Those things all belong to me. Those are values that I have, traits that I have that helped to generate that value. But the organization isn't my value. If I were to lose it tomorrow, or if I were to walk away from it, I would still have my value. And the same is true in a relationship. We may build something of value with someone. I Mean, that's what a relationship is, isn't it? It's two people who are building value together. But that value, your value is not the relationship. Your value is your value. When you leave the relationship, your value remains intact. You didn't lose any of your value when someone walked away. And if we're sitting here saying to ourselves, but the relationship was my value, I liked how much value I had in other people's eyes when they saw me with that person. I felt important by being with that person, felt special by being with that person. That's honest. If you can be that honest with yourself, that's great. But that then should be a signal, a signal that something is going wrong in the way I'm building my life and the way I'm building my confidence. If I am putting. If I'm investing in creating the value that is me outside of myself. And a lot of us do that. We, you know, we were raised by parents who took care of us. Maybe they did a good job, maybe they didn't. Or caregivers if we didn't have direct parents. And at some point it was our job to go away and. And build our own value. We were old enough to be responsible for building our own value. And most of us were never taught that it was our job at that point to build our own value. So what we do then is we go looking for value outside of ourselves. We go looking for things that can make us valuable if we get them, whether it's status or a partner or money, whatever can give me a sense that this thing I have gives me value. And we spend our whole lives placing that value outside of ourselves. And that's why we get so terrified of losing things, is because we think, if I lose my money, if I lose my job, if I lose my status, if I lose this impressive partner that I'm with right now, then I lose my value, because that was my value. But we have to start making that key distinction that we can build things of value in our life, like a relationship, a career, a business. But the things that we create value in aren't our value. In a way, those things outside of us, they're only ever rented, like the car. We are the only thing that we are guaranteed to own from now till the day we die. We're the only asset that is always going to be there with us every single day. Relationships can end, businesses can go under, money can be lost. Even friends and family, we know we can lose them. We are the only asset, the only thing that we will Absolutely have for our entire lives. Most people, instead of building that asset, are always looking for some shortcut to value on the outside. And that's part of why we do it, isn't it? Part of why we do it is because we think that if we get with this person that's super charismatic or hot or, you know, powerful, they have something about them. We think that that's like a quick route to feeling valuable, to having value. But shortcuts like that don't work because all it does is make it make us a prisoner to that relationship. We can't lose the relationship because we don't want to lose our value. That's one of the reasons why people stay in toxic relationships for so long, is because even if they're being treated terribly, and let's be clear, if you're being treated terribly by someone that doesn't have value, that has a negative value, if anything, there's no value to being around someone who constantly treats us terribly. So why would we stay in a situation where there's no value to it whatsoever? It's because we think that our value is tied to that relationship. Because if we were basing whether to stay or leave on the value of the relationship, we would have left a long time ago. But if we think that the relationship is our value and it's not something that has to have value outside of us, then we'll hold onto it, even if it's torture, even if it's hell on earth. Because we think losing the relationship would mean losing our value. We have to start building our own value. And then when we go out into the world, what happens is we don't cling to things that aren't serving us or making us happy. We invest in things where we feel like we're actually getting something back, where we feel like if it's a relationship, that person is investing too. And together we are building something of value. Together, you still have your value on your own, and I still have my value on my own. But together we are building something of value outside of ourselves. That's what a healthy relationship looks like. But you can only go into that in an impartial way when you already have a value of your own. And like I said, a lot of people that they would rather the shortcut, they would rather get a helicopter to some status or some value by attaching themselves to something on the outside of themselves than to build it themselves. Your ex is their own person with their own life. Wish them well and let them go. Because their story is not relevant to you anymore because it's not your story. The moment the two of you parted ways, their story was no longer your story. It was irrelevant to you. And if you're going, but I feel bad because they're doing well or whatever, that's because in some way you're still trying to borrow value from that person and it irks you that they're doing well and that you don't have them anymore. But if you say that person was never anything to do with my value, their success was never my success, that has nothing to do with me whatsoever. I'm on my own path, my success is my success and that's it. Period. Their success has nothing to do with me. What they're doing in their life has nothing to do with me because my value doesn't come from that. They were only ever rented. In my relationship with them, it was only ever a rental. Now, what we built together could have been real. We could have owned that together. But if you break up, then that go. They go back to being a rental. And it doesn't matter to you what happens after that, because it was never yours. I want you to ask yourself, if instead of trying to borrow value from elsewhere, you doubled down, tripled down on the investment that is you, what would you do for yourself this year, this week, this month, if you dropped your ego? Because sometimes when we're starting again or when we feel like, oh my God, I haven't focused on myself and my own value and my own investment in myself in a long time. For what I way too long, I've been deriving my worth from being in this marriage for way too long. I've been deriving this worth from this company that I have or from these friends that I have, or from my status in society or whatever it is from the people I'm dating. If you've been doing that for a long time, it can feel like starting from zero when you start to invest in yourself again. But let me tell you, the value you build up in yourself, even if it's from nothing, is real. You own it, it's yours. No one can take it away from you. And when that is the case, all of a sudden, it empowers you in your life. You start going into decision making a little more boldly. You go into the room, that date, that job interview, much more boldly because you are actually connected to your value. You're not going on a date secretly going, you're going to be my value if you choose me. So please choose me, because I need to have value. You're going on a date going I already have value. I've already built my value. I've already invested in the asset that is me. If you and I choose to build something together, that's awesome. I'm excited to see what we build. If we don't, I walk away and I have all of my value to take with me. What would you do to invest in yourself if you took this approach? Because this investing in yourself is the antidote to caring what your ex is doing, to being obsessed with them and their life still, even though they're not around anymore and for anything else in life. You know the comparison that we make with friends who we think are doing better than us or people in life that we think are further ahead than us, or the fears we have about losing something in our life when we're afraid of what might happen to us in our job or our business. When we invest in ourselves, we safeguard ourselves against any loss in our life. And if we're too afraid right now, it's because we haven't been investing in ourselves. That can be reversed in a heartbeat if you make a decision to invest in yourself today. Thank you so much for listening to the episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Before you go, make sure that you do this today. I promise you, every week you are missing out by not doing what I'm about to say. I am sending a private email to a group of people who have registered for it every single Friday. The email is called the three Relationships and every email is packed with advice on how you can improve one of the three relationships that I believe determine the quality of your life. Your relationship with other people, your relationship with yourself, and your relationship with life itself. It's a super valuable email. People really look forward to it. This is not the kind of email that you don't open is the kind of email you can't wait wait to see in your inbox every Friday. Go over to the3relationships.com to sign up for that email for free and I will see you in your inbox this Friday. Thanks for listening everyone. I'll see you in the next episode. Be well and love life. Sam.
