3 Most Important Things I Learned About Self-improvement

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I have been on a path of self-improvement for several years now. In those years, I’ve gone through many materials. Some bad, most mediocre, some good and a few exceptional. Below, I share with you the three most important things I learned.

1. There’s a difference between education and experience

As summarized by Dr. Paul, your intellect consists of two parts. The more left-brained, organised booksmarts – education. And the more right-brained, creative, streetsmarts – experience.

They’re two different things and one can’t substitute for the other. If you want to learn to play the piano, you can’t just read books about it without actually getting out there and I playing the piano. Similarly you can’t just sit down at the piano and hope to learn it by simply playing. You will learn, but it will go about a hundred times slower than with some education.

If you are reading this, chances are you are more top-heavy on education. Scary as it sounds, getting out in the real world and doing things is one of the best things you can do for yourself.

You can’t overcompensate for a lack of experience through education. Trust me, I tried it. I had spent about two years reading up on how to pick up women. In the end I decided to just go out there and get some practice – and lo and behold, I improved a lot more in a few days than I did over a year of reading about the topic.

2. Defeating procrastination is not about will-power

A lot of people out there are saying you can defeat procrastination by simply trying harder. I found that this isn’t exactly how it works.

Procrastination usually stems from two causes. Either you don’t feel like doing the task because you think it’s boring/pointless/whatever. Or you find the task daunting – you don’t know where to start.

In the first case, the key is emotional energy. Instead of “trying harder”, you would need to build some excitement or enthusiasm about the task. If it’s boring, make it more challenging for yourself. Like the time I had to read a boring book in my english class. It was so annoyingly boring I just couldn’t do it.

Then I decided to read the book upside down instead to make it more interesting. It suddenly became fun in a kind of childish silly way. I actually probably read more of the book that way than I would have otherwise because of the procrastination (though it’s damn slow reading upside down). Plus the happiness and fun I got from it and took with me out of the class were more than worth it.

If the reason for your procrastination is that the task is daunting, the key is breaking it up into smaller pieces.

An actress once decided to do a theatre play. Until then, she had only done movies. Movies are filmed one short scene at a time, so she felt confident about that. But learning her lines for a whole theatre play seemed really daunting.

The advice she got was to simply learn the play one scene at a time as if they were just short scenes in a movie. After that, all she had to do was string those scenes together and voila! She had learned her lines for the whole play.

Similarly, if you face a daunting task, simply break it up into small pieces and then string those together. A man once managed to eat a whole airplane over the course of several years. You can achieve anything by breaking it down into manageable bits.

3. Self-control is like a muscle

There’s a famous experiment that demonstrates this. The researchers took two groups of people. One of them had a bunch of donuts in front of them on the table, and were told that they can’t eat them. The other group simply had an empty table in front of them. Both groups had to sit there for half an hour and then do some mentally challenging tasks, like calculations. The second group (without donuts) consistently fared better.

This is because the first group depleted their levels of self-control by resisting the donuts. Or, as I like to think of it, they tired their self-control muscles.

The good news is that just like a muscle, self-control can be practiced and made stronger. As I’m writing this, I’ve been waking up at six in the morning for almost a week, and am on my way to make it a permanent habit.

I tried waking up earlier many times in the past, but I always slipped. I didn’t have enough self-control. The breaking point came when I decided to initially train my self-control muscles on small things.

I would control some impulsive eating. I would take a shower in the evening no matter how tired I was (it helps me sleep better, so it’s worth it). I would turn off the computer in the evening and go to sleep instead of browsing the internet aimlessly and consequently waking up dead tired (this was a big one, it took me weeks to have enough self-control to do it).

The point is, if you don’t have enough self-control right now to do some things you want, you can strengthen your self-control muscles through practice.

Those are the three most important things I learned about self-improvement. What are the most important things you learned about self-improvement? Leave them in the comments.

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