Only when you start to implement these ideas, to observe yourself, to recognise your many personalities and roles, your identification, your susceptibilities and the extent to which you are influenced by external circumstances or other people – only if you can find yourself after forgetting yourself have you really begun the actual work on your own improvement.
This work can take years, and you may experience continuous setbacks, but if you really make the effort you will be successful.
A good teacher or group of like-minded people would be ideal, but it is so easy to happen upon the wrong one.
There are many traps you can fall into on the long road towards finding yourself. Here are just a few of them:

1. Confusing study and reading with the work itself. Things only change if they are actually changed, however. This means hard daily work on yourself.

2. Talking and writing about the work without doing it. Working on oneself internally is not particularly exciting, must it must be done tirelessly on a daily basis.

3. The urge to teach others something you are not yet able to do yourself.

4. The urge to save others before being able to help yourself.
This is why we allow the beginner a healthy amount of selfishness. He must help himself first. He must first observe and recognise himself before he can recognise and assess others.

5. The illusion that you are a “chosen one”.

6. Becoming a star-struck disciple, believing everything your teacher says and giving up thinking for yourself.

7. Fanatically believing that only one path – to the exclusion of all others – leads to the goal.

8. Only working when your teacher or others are present, but forgetting yourself at home or in the office.

9. Meandering from one path to another and from one teacher to the next, but never staying long enough to really learn something. Always going in search of something even better to avoid having to do the work itself.

So don’t let’s confuse theoretical study with actually working on ourselves!