Have you gratitude journalled today? What about the frog – you ate the frog, right? And how’s your productivity; it better be at least 150% what it was last week. And don’t forget the bullet journal you need to create, the second brain you have to build, or time-blocking every day between now and 2085.
The internet is an invaluable resource, but it also mixes poorly with our overstimulated minds and our low self-esteem. It’s full of people and articles telling you to be better. But not just that you can be better, but that you must. There’s often a secret you haven’t learnt yet, or a painful truth you need to hear.
And because clicks are the currency of the day, no one’s ever going to write an article with a headline like ‘Three ways you could improve your productivity, if there’s a genuine reason you need to do that and you’re confident it won’t negatively impact your wellbeing’.
Nope, that article is going to be called something like ‘Three ways to finally make something of your lazy, worthless life’.
Self-improvement overload
Of course, I like self-improvement content. Because I like self-improvement. But ten minutes of scrolling puts my brain into overload.
Read just a few articles and you’ll have 100 different tricks, techniques, behaviours, habits, strategies and systems that you’re supposed to start applying to your life right now, and without utilising every single one of them, your hopes and dreams will all just turn to shit.
It’s a bit like on Christmas Day when you’re trying to plug one of your children’s new games console into the TV, while also putting stickers on the other’s Playmobil fire engine, peel the potatoes, unwrap the Terry’s Chocolate Orange for Great Granny, stop the dog eating the wrapping paper and make sure the cat doesn’t try and assassinate the tree angel again.
Put simply: it’s too much. We can’t do all that stuff. And we don’t need to. It’s a myth that these things are simple, and the reason we aren’t all doing them already isn’t always a lack of drive or motivation or conviction or whatever.
Life can get in the way. Our daily routines can’t always accommodate the 18 morning habits of highly successful people. Or – and this one is key – sometimes our personalities just aren’t right for the hugely prescriptive doctrines others find useful.
In fact, it’s rather ironic that lots of people who bang on about empowering creatives also seem to constantly spout the kind of advice and commandments that would turn us into a homogenous mass of bland conformity. It’s like buying an exquisitely-layered trifle and then mashing it into a pinky-beige mess with a hammer.
So how do you self-improve responsibly?
You start by doing you. The goal of self-improvement, as the name suggests, is to help you grow into a better version of yourself. It’s not to make you into a clone of one of the richest people in the world.
Other people’s idea of success should have no bearing on you. Unless your life goal is to become the billionaire CEO of a tech company, you don’t need to make your life into a carbon copy of one of those peeps. If your life goal is to stream Minecraft on Twitch you don’t need to read 10 essential books on leadership (you can if you like, just sayin’).
Pick what you can carry
I like to think of my forays into self-improvement content like walking into Waterstones with a gift card. The amount I can consume is limited. In theory I could dive into the fiction section and experience, vicariously, a messy divorce, love at first sight, a dragon attack, an alien invasion, two BFF’s starting a vegan waffle stand in post-apocalyptic Wiggan.
Or I could head to non-fiction and learn to cook, or knit, or do origami, or learn French, or semaphore, or discover what happened in Ancient Egypt, or see what’s going on in modern Egypt, or read the latest celebrity autobiography. And so on.
But of all that possibility, I pick one or two things that really appeal to me and I take them with me. You don’t need five new systems, three new habits, one big secret, and so on. Just choose the tips or tricks that appeal to you and give those a try. Carry on browsing, but don’t pick anything else up until you know you have time for it.
You do you: it’s self-improvement after all
And remember: you don’t need to be better. You want to be better. And in the same way someone who wants to go to the cinema picks the movie, the person who wants to improve gets to decide how, and when.
You’re not here to be lectured. Anyone who tries to, should stick their advice right up their gratitude journal and systematise it.
