What does self-improvement for realists mean?

Threading the needle between the mystical and the impractical

The subhead for this blog is Self-Improvement for Realists. What exactly does that mean? To explain that, it would be best to give two examples of what it’s not.

Realistic self-improvement is not mystical

There are some self-improvement books that tell you all you need to do is want something hard enough, or believe you’ll succeed hard enough, or put off enough positive energy, and you will achieve it. As if the universe is some sort of magical wish-granting genie that will give you everything you want if you can only discover the right mental incantation.

Realistic self-improvement is not impractical

Then there are self-improvement books that stick to the material plane, and focus on physical actions and thoughts without relying on external magic. But the advice they give is so overly burdensome or contrary to the nature of the type of person who would be reading the book, that very few people are actually going to follow it. And often, following the advice would be downright impossible without completely upending your life.

These are the books that tell you every day you need to exercise for an hour, meditate for an hour, spend an hour in nature, spend two hours of quality time with your family, make sure to get eight hours of sleep, don’t look at screens within three hours of bedtime, spend three hours a day cooking nutritionally balanced locally sourced certified organic GMO-free plant-based paleo keto carb-free macrobiotic calorie-restricted savory meals, keep a gratitude journal, dream journal, food journal, mood journal, goal journal, general journal, and journal to keep track of all your journals, schedule every minute of your week in advance, check in with your mentor, life-coach, and therapist, get out there and network, take time every day to catch up with an old friend, spend an hour a day learning a new skill, read classic literature, volunteer for the less fortunate, keep your house perfectly organized, don’t forget to take time out for yourself, and if you aren’t spending at least four hours a day on your side-hustle, clearly you don’t want it enough.

Meanwhile you’re thinking, “I spend ten hours a day at work plus two hours commuting, and I have to get my kids to school in the morning and to bed at night, and run errands whenever I can squeeze them in, and maybe try to keep my house from being a complete disaster. I don’t have a spare minute, and if I did I would be too exhausted to do any of this stuff. Do you think there’s 90 hours in a day?”

Both of these kinds of books are worse than useless. Not only will they fail to improve your life, but they’ll leave you feeling bad about yourself. The first kind makes you think your failure to achieve magic is because you didn’t want it or believe hard enough. The second kind makes you feel like you’re a loser who just didn’t try hard enough, when really it was setting up an impossible standard.

Realistic self-improvement comes from building sustainable and meaningful habits

So what is self-improvement for realists?

First of all, for self-improvement advice to be useful at all, it has to be something you’ll actually do. That seems a rather obvious point, but that’s missing from a lot of self-improvement books. The authors seem to have the attitude of, “Well, I told you how to have a better life, and if you don’t do what I said, that’s your your own damn fault.” But if the advice is something that in reality is only going to be followed by someone who has the temperament, skills, lifestyle, and free time of a self-help guru, then that’s a flaw with the author and the book, not the reader. It would be like if LeBron James wrote a book on how to play basketball that said, “Just practice a lot and throw the ball through the hoop.” That book’s not going to be useful to you, since you don’t have LeBron James’s skills.

So what distinguishes impractical advice from realistic advice? Self-improvement advice is realistic if it consists of building sustainable habits. And the key word there is sustainable. As in not just something you’ll do for a few days while you’re psyched up from reading that book and eager for change, but something you’re willing to do for the rest of your life.

So what makes a habit sustainable? It needs to be something that is convenient, easy, small, enjoyable, takes minimal time-commitment, offers immediate positive feedback, or is a series of small progressive changes that steadily build up over time.

If you try to make a change to your life that doesn’t fit into one (or ideally, multiple) of these categories, then most likely you’re doomed to failure. But if you can find a way to fit a change into a habit that does fit these categories, it makes it far easier to succeed.

The second thing that makes self-improvement realistic is that the habit has to lead to meaningful results. This also seems obvious, but ideas like the Law of Attraction miss that. Visualizing yourself as, say, a best-selling author, is enjoyable and therefore an easy habit to keep. But it’s not going to do anything if you don’t also build the habit of taking time to write. (And do the publishing, marketing, networking, and all the other less glamorous business around writing.)

What is self-improvement for realists? It’s the understanding that there’s no magical easy fixes. Making our lives better takes time, effort, and commitment. It’s hard to do, but with the right techniques, we can make it easier. And in fact, figuring out the ways to make it easier is the only way to succeed.

This is the life we have, and we should do what is feasible and practical to live it the best that we can.