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What's Beyond Self-Improvement?
Mentally Tearing Down Your Past Achievements
Sometimes, what was previously good enough is now not acceptable anymore. It could be a person who gets in shape but now wants 6% body fat.
The problem isn't the mindset of continual growth, but motivating that growth by creating new, imagined needs. One can pursue excellence without mentally downgrading your past accomplishments.
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A Life Full Of Struggles
For many people, life is full of struggles. However, many struggles can be lessened through reasonably clear steps: set goals, build better habits, learn more, do the work.
When you're successful with all the big parts of your life, there may be some pleasure in obtaining it, but no enduring satisfaction. Just like the pleasure in eating when you're very hungry, afterward, there is simply a nothingness. This realization often comes as a surprise.
Struggles Create A Motivating Tension
Facing life's struggles often create pain and lack, but it also adds a motivating tension in your life that gives structure and direction for the things you do.
Once the major struggles in your life are gone, the motivating tension diminishes too. The result is that you desire to regain that energizing force. One strategy people use to regain this tension is self-destruction. They break the thing they worked hard to build.
Mentally Tearing Down Your Past Achievements
Sometimes, what was previously good enough is now not acceptable anymore. It could be a person who gets in shape but now wants 6% body fat.
The problem isn't the mindset of continual growth, but motivating that growth by creating new, imagined needs. One can pursue excellence without mentally downgrading your past accomplishments.
Goals That Are Not Explicitly Improving Your Life
Since most of our motivating tensions come from our difficulties, we create struggles to feel the motivation.
To escape this trap, we need to shift our philosophy of life away from fixing our problems and onto goals that you know won't explicitly improve your life. These include service to others, pursuing mastery, or creative vision.
Self-Improvement And Diminishing Returns
Self-improvement can reach a stage of diminishing returns. Once your basic needs are met, and there are no large, obvious things that would make your life better, the motivating tension that structured and guided your life may be gone and create a vacuum you want to fill. A major indicator that you're near a transition is when you mostly feel bored.
We have to consider planning for this transition. This involves new ways of thinking about the step beyond.
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Learning is not the same as studying
You might not study at all. However, learning underpins your life.
In relationships, you need to understand your partner and know how to communicate. At work, you prof...
Only putting in time does not lead to mastery
Doing something every day doesn't guarantee mastery, only adequacy. What is needed is deliberate practice.
Only putting in time does not lead to mastery. You may improve at first but will eventually reach a comfortable level and stay there indefinitely.
What separates growth from stagnation
Research on violinists shows that those who went on to become concert performers didn't practice more, but the time spent in deliberate practice was much higher.
Deliberate practice means trading automatic behavior for strategies to increase performance.
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Improvement with learning
From the moment we are born, we are always learning new skills. We see it in formal capacities in school or on the job, and informally, like learning from you buddy how to grill a steak.
Tony Robbins
“One skill you want to master in this day and age we live in, if you want to have an extraordinary life, is the ability to learn rapidly.”
Select your skill carefully
Be very selective in the skill you're trying to masker to avoid sabotaging your success:
- Make sure it's applicable: The perfect skill either solves a problem you have or scratches an itch you have.
- Be very specific: Specific goals are easier to pursue than vague counterparts. To set yourself up, narrow your skill down as much as possible. Ask what specific problem are you trying to solve, and find out what aspects you find most fascinating.
- Make sure you love the process, not just the outcome: Pick a skill where the road is as exciting as the outcome. Then plan out celebration points along the way.
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Approaching Burnout At Work
Feeling and identifying the signs of job burnout is a powerful way to arm yourself with the strategies and resources needed to prevent it from bringing you down. So if it’s time to...
Routines Against Burnout
Strong morning and nighttime routines increase your productivity levels, ability to focus, and improve your overall mental and physical health. Your routines can include a healthy meal, exercise, reading, meditation, enjoying time with your family and friends.
However you build your routines, they should be full of activities that bring you joy and fulfillment. Self-care is essential to dealing with job burnout.
Burnout Is An Emotional Exhaustion
It’s a syndrome that results from an extreme accumulation of improperly managed workplace stress that can lead to physical, mental, and social consequences.
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Energy and happiness
Happiness comes from one measure: your energy.
- High energy: Good mood, feeling confident, looking forward to the future, chest up, smiling, enjoying myself, and enjoying my...
Improve your self-knowledge
... by asking yourself questions like:
- Why am I in a good mood today?
- Why am I in a bad mood today?
- Why am I happy in this moment?
- Why am I stressed right now?
Manage your energy
Ask yourself:
- What activities destroy my mood and drain my energy?
- What activities make me feel good and give energy?
It’s not about avoiding hard things. It’s about looking at the results activities have on your mood.
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Self-improvement junkies
For them, the purpose of self-improvement is rather motivated by a subtle form of FOMO (fear of missing out).
They feel like they need to jump on every new seminar, read all the latest...
Self-improvement tourists
These are the people that only come to self-help when things go wrong in life.
They just got slapped in the face with a divorce or someone close to them just died and now they’re depressed. They use self-help material to fix whatever is bothering them, to get them back on their feet, and then they’re off into the world again.
Paradox of self-improvement
The only way to truly benefit from self-improvement is to one day arrive at a place where you no longer need it.
It’s fine to indulge in self-improvement material as long as you understand your relationship to it. And you make sure that it’s a relationship where you control it, not the other way around.
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Identity and Work
- Work, even if we find it unpleasant, provides us with meaning, purpose and structure in our lives. This is because we get a sense of identity from our work.
- Advances in technology and ...
Finding Meaning
To live a significant, worthwhile life, one has to do something beyond oneself. The two ways to transcend oneself outside of work are:
- Pursuing Mastery.
- Performing acts of kindness.
Emily Esfahani Smith
"When people say that their lives have meaning, they evaluate their lives as significant and worthwhile, as part of something bigger."
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There will always be too much to do
The demands on our time continue to increase, but our capacities remain mostly fixed. In an attempt to get on top of everything, we'll generate more tasks.
The upside is that ...
Choose growth over happiness
Major personal decisions should be made not by asking if it will make you happy, but if this choice will enlarge or diminish you.
We are not good at predicting what will make us happy - it makes us concentrate on our narrow preferences for security and control. Focusing on enlargement questions draws out a more in-depth, intuitive response. You tend to know whether choosing to do something may bring short-term comfort that would prevent growth.
Being able to tolerate minor discomfort
You may already know it won't kill you to endure the mild discomfort of starting a difficult conversation with a colleague or asking someone out. You know that it's possible to let that feeling rise and fade while doing the action anyway.
The rewards come so swiftly that this becomes a more appealing way to live.
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Happiness and struggle
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Habits
Habits form a core idea in behavior change. It requires that you change your behavior by regularly doing something.
To get fit, you need to have a habit of eating well and exercising. T...
Goal-Setting
Goal-setting is required to decide what you want and planning how to get there. Just having an idea of what you want to achieve is usually not enough. Setting a goal needs to be paired with plans, systems, or habits to make it achievable.
Goal-setting should be SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.) However, some people argue for being completely process-oriented and ignoring outcomes.
Systems
Systems organize your behavior and decisions with formal rules. They are often built off of concepts of scientific management and organizational theory, but it is applied to your personal life.
A productivity system is one type of system that is aimed at helping you get work done by organizing the things that need doing and telling you when to do them.
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MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses)
A recent study suggests that MOOCs do not disrupt world-class education as initially thought, nor are they accessible to the entire world.
- Online learners are concentra...
Self-learners
- Teaching yourself anything can be draining and quite a lonely process.
- When you care about what you are learning, it can lift your spirits and makes you more confident.
- Having a few peers can make it a whole lot easier.
If you have a long-term system that you regularly practice you can increase your odds for success.
Find a reason
Don't just learn something for the sake of it or because you're excited about the idea of loving X. You may find yourself unable to sustain your energy and stop midway, or you may be doing an endless series of courses without actually putting them to any use.
- Consciously find reasons that learning X is the absolute best possible use of your time right now.
- Ask what makes you excited about X.
- Hang around an online community of people who love X and go down the rabbit hole.
If you make sure that you really desire to learn X, it will no longer remain a task, but become an adventure. You will hunger after knowledge and have the energy to find answers to your questions.
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