You look at what it costs you now and can't understand why you keep doing it. You call it self-sabotage, or stupidity. You have been hard on yourself about it for years. If a friend said this to me I'd tell them to stop being so hard on themselves. I know that, and I still do it.
This page is about rules in general. Whether one is running for you is not something a page can say.
01
The payoff is real
Every rule's entry lists what it gets a person, and none of the payoffs is imaginary.
Under Output, competence is real and it does get rewarded. Under Peace, the room stays calm, and the person is good at keeping it that way. Under Ahead, the vigilance works, and they catch things other people miss.
So a rule is not a mistake someone keeps making. It is something that paid off, and may still.
02
Then and now
The library's view is that whatever is running a person was useful once. It worked, and that is why it is still there.
The trouble comes when the condition stays after the situation that called for it has gone. Each entry also lists a long-term cost. For Output, the arrival never delivers. For Peace, the limit can arrive only at the far end, after the damage. For Ahead, peace itself can stop feeling safe.
As the library sees it, a rule carries no check on whether it is still needed. That checking may have to be done on purpose.
03
One example
Someone found, in a first job, that the person who anticipated every problem was the one who was kept. They anticipated every problem. They were kept, and promoted.
Years later the job is secure, and they can't take a week off without checking in every day.
There are at least two candidates. Under Ahead the fear is that if you stop managing, something goes wrong again. Under Right it is that if you are wrong about this, what else are you wrong about.
Control the outcome, or avoid being wrong? Control the outcome is the Ahead answer. Avoid being wrong is the Right answer.
It may be neither. The job may really come apart without them, and then the checking is an accurate reading of the job.
04
What follows
Contempt for it may not help. Something that protected a person is unlikely to be shamed out of existence, and trying tends to add a second problem to the first.
The more useful questions are what it was for, and whether that is still at stake. Subtraction asks both. Sometimes the answer to the second is yes. Sometimes there is not enough to tell.
The same point about the things you do, as opposed to the rule under them, is on Strategies Are Not Character Flaws.