Don’t challenge yourself.
That sounds shocking.
Contrary to all the self-help advice you’ve ever seen. Contrary to what all your teachers, mentors, guidance counselors, coaches, seminar leaders, corporate mission statements, and motivational posters say. I’m probably arguing with Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street here, and who wants to disagree with them?
Maybe you think I’m being sarcastic when I say not to challenge yourself.
Or maybe you think this is some sort of reverse-psychology pretend gatekeeping, and I’m about to say “Don’t challenge yourself if you want to be an ordinary loser, but if you want to be great, blah blah blah.”
But no. I mean it. Don’t challenge yourself.
I don’t object to challenging yourself for fun. If you want to climb a mountain, or learn to paint, or do a really hard crossword puzzle, knock yourself out. (Though only if you’d be okay with the consequences of failure.)
But when it comes to self-improvement, do everything possible to avoid a challenge.
Why do I say this?
Self-Help Doesn’t Work
Self-Help doesn’t work.
Not the way most people try it.
If it worked, you’d read a self-help book, follow its advice, your life would be all better, and you wouldn’t need any more self-help.
But that doesn’t happen when real people read a self-help book.
(Or a self-help blog, vlog, e-mail list, TV show, podcast, seminar, webinar, etc. I’m just going to say book from here on, but assume I mean all of these.)
Here’s what actually happens:
You read a self-help book, and think to yourself, “Wow, these are great ideas! I’m so inspired! I’m going to embrace the challenge of following all of this advice!”
Then you try to implement it. And you discover that it’s complicated, difficult, and time-consuming. The actual challenge of doing what the book recommends is much harder than it was in your imagination.
Maybe you keep it up for a few days. But then you get too busy, or distracted, and don’t get around to following the book’s suggestions.
You tell yourself it’s okay. You’ll get back on track tomorrow. But the next day you skip it again. And the next day. And the day after that.
Eventually, you stop pretending that you’re even trying.
Or perhaps you never implement the strategies at all. You think they’re great, and you want to do them, and you’ll definitely start them “soon.” But “soon” never comes.
Either way, your life and problems stay the same. Except now you feel like it’s your fault, because you weren’t able to do what the self-help book told you. You have this nagging voice saying, “I could be living an awesome life, but I was too lazy/cowardly to follow through on what I was supposed to do. I’m such a loser!”
So you turn to another self-help book. And the cycle repeats.
This isn’t your fault.
It’s the fault of the books. And the entire self-help environment. Because it’s all built on the foundation of challenging yourself.
But CHALLENGING YOURSELF DOESN’T WORK.
The Problem With Self-Help Authors
Most successful self-help authors are highly intelligent. They have the skill to write clearly and persuasively. The courage to renounce a safe life of working a normal job, in exchange for the highly uncertain field of self-help guruship. The willpower to spend every day writing, doing all the behind-the-scenes busywork, building up their side hustle and other projects, and practicing their own advice. The confidence to believe people would want to know their thoughts. And the charisma and marketing skills to promote their book enough that you’ve heard of it.
These are all quite admirable. We can aspire to be like them. But it leads to a serious problem:
Self-help books aren’t written for the kinds of people who need self-help books. They’re written for the kinds of people who write self help books.
People see the world from their own perspective, and don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s head.
Self-help authors can tell you what worked for them. But they are extreme outliers in many ways. They are what I call super-achievers. They are different from most people.
Since they’re super-achievers, it seems perfectly reasonable for them to suggest that every day you should 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 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.
They’re able to manage all this, so they assume you should too.
That’s an extreme example, but even something as simple-sounding as spending an hour doing XYZ will be beyond the capabilities of many people.
A lot of people don’t even have an hour to spare after work, commute, caring for their family, keeping their house in order, and other basic life responsibilities. An hour they spend on self-improvement would be deducted from sleep, and probably leave them worse off.
Even for those who do have spare time and theoretically could spare an hour that would otherwise be spent watching TV or screwing around on Facebook, they often won’t have the energy to do so after a long and stressful day of dealing with their other responsibilities.
Sometimes self-help authors will just tell you to have extremely high amounts of energy, willpower, free time, courage, confidence, and discipline. As if you can simply decide to have all the qualities that make someone a super-achiever.
Sometimes they’ll claim that following their advice will turn you into a super-achiever. But then they give instructions that rely on you already having enormous amounts of willpower, courage, confidence, skill, intelligence, discipline, non-conformity, free time, and marketing ability – the same qualities that would have made you a super-achiever in the first place.
What worked for them is not going to work for you.
Self-help authors mean well. They genuinely want the best for you.
But they don’t understand that you are different from them, so they often do more harm than good.
Because they tie their improvement to challenging you.
Some People Love to Make Things Difficult
I once watched a discussion between Kobe Bryant and Nick Saban, two of the all-time greats in their fields. They agreed that to be the best, you have to work harder than everyone else. They scoffed at the notion of a work-life balance. Then Bryant rolled his eyes at people who want to take time away from incredibly hard work to have fun.
Bryant said what he finds fun is working hard to be the best. Training, practicing, doing everything possible to give him the skills to dominate his opponents – that was fun for him.
This was meant to be inspirational, but it demonstrated a very different point:
Kobe Bryant was able to become so great because he found it fun to train every waking moment. It didn’t take willpower, and he didn’t have to force himself. He was doing what he most wanted to do.
Someone who doesn’t find nonstop training fun isn’t going to be able to follow his advice.
The same is true of self-help authors. They love to work hard. They love to embrace challenges. They practice what they preach, follow their own advice, and love every minute of it.
Which means if you don’t love hard work as much as they do, their advice isn’t going to be very helpful to you.
This isn’t a moral failing in you for having finite energy and wanting more out of life than non-stop work. It’s a failing of the authors for not realizing their readers aren’t super-achievers like them.
Are You a Super-Achiever?
An important question to ask yourself is if you are a super-achiever.
Not “do you want to be a super-achiever,” or “do you feel like you’re a super-achiever who hasn’t unlocked your potential?”
Are you one right now, already, before attempting any self-help?
Have you ever given a TED talk? Do you have tens of thousands of followers? Are you a self-made multi-millionaire? Did you found several successful businesses before you were 25. Are you a Navy SEAL? Are you considered the foremost expert on something?
Then you’re probably a super-achiever, and the challenging advice in self-help books is for you.
Are you living a normal life (or what you consider to be a sub-normal life), turning to self-help because you’re unhappy or dissatisfied, and you want things to be better?
Then you probably aren’t a super-achiever, and advice built on the premise that you have the qualities of a super-achiever isn’t going to work for you.
Self-Help Books Are a Tool
Change is hard.
You have to overcome deeply ingrained habits, which means battling your own brain’s neural pathways.
This is difficult enough on its own. Why would you intentionally make it harder by embracing a challenging strategy for self-improvement?
Self-help books are a means to an end. The goal of self-improvement isn’t to follow the instructions in a book.
The point of self-improvement is to achieve your goals, live a better life, and be happier and more fulfilled.
Self-help books ought to be a tool that you use to adjust your life. But most self-help books are a broken tool that will only cause frustration.
When a self-help book challenges you, you struggle to implement its methods instead of focusing your efforts on living a better life.
Self-help books should make improving your life easier, not harder.
Self-Help Should Be As Easy As Possible
For self-improvement to work, it has to be easy.
Ultimately, for some change to better your life in the long term, you have to build it into a habit. Once it’s a habit, it will become automatic.
To make something into a habit, you have to repeat it long enough and consistently enough to build neural pathways in your brain. This will probably take months.
You won’t be able to keep up something challenging that long. So look for easy things.
Find improvements that can be done in a few minutes a day, or no time, or actually give you time back.
The behaviors you’re most likely to maintain long enough to form a habit are ones that are simple and take minimal time commitment.
Or you can take a page from Kobe Bryant and find ways to improve yourself that are fun for you, since it’s not a challenge to make yourself do something fun. (Look for things that are fun specifically for you, which may be different from what others find fun.)
Find easy wins. Small things that won’t be a challenge to do consistently, that will make your life better in some way.
Implementing easy wins is, well, easy.
Some Challenges Are Unavoidable
Sometimes life throws challenges at us that we don’t choose. Raising a special needs child, caring for a loved one going through an illness, or suffering from mental health difficulties.
Sometimes there are things to improve yourself that are necessary, and there’s no way to do it other than to take on a challenge. Such as kicking an addiction, or going through a divorce.
Often people work at jobs that involve taking on challenges. Examples are too numerous to list, as there are very few jobs that don’t involve challenges.
I’m not suggesting you shirk your responsibilities, or run away from necessary challenges.
But when you have to take on a challenge, you should look for ways to make resolving it as easy as possible. You shouldn’t go out of your way to make it even harder than it needs to be.
And you shouldn’t intentionally create challenges in your life. (Unless that’s something you find fun.)
Small Changes Add Up
There’s a saying that “nothing worth doing is easy.” This looks good on a motivational poster, but it’s simply not true. Breathing is fairly worthwhile, and most of us don’t find it hard.
I’m not peddling some sort of magic cure-all. It’s very unlikely that anything you do for five minutes a day is going to completely transform your life.
But it could make your life a little bit better.
Doing something easy to make your life a little bit better is infinitely better than wanting to do something hard to make your life a lot better but not following through on it.
Moreover, you’re not just doing one thing to improve your life. You’re doing many things.
Meditate for a few minutes every morning and it makes your life a little bit better.
Keep a gratitude journal and it makes your life a little bit better.
Quit arguing on the internet and it makes your life a little bit better.
Give up sugary soda and it makes your life a little bit better.
Foster a positive attitude and it makes your life a little bit better.
Do twenty other things that each make your life a little bit better, and eventually you’ve made your life a lot better.
There’s Still Value in Self Help Books
I’ve read over 50 self-help books. I think plenty of them are great, and well worth reading.
But you have to read them in the right way.
First, if there’s a book you’ve already read that is working for you, that’s great. Any book that improves your life is a good book for you, and don’t let me discourage you.
But in general, don’t read a self-help book thinking “I’m going to do everything this book recommends.”
Read it thinking “What specific tidbits and pieces of advice can I pull from this that are compatible with my nature and the way I live my life.”
Then implement a few at a time, finding easy ways to slot them into your life.
Some may say that the whole point of self-help is to change your nature and the way you live your life, not fit into them. To turn you from a normal person into a super-achiever. But you can’t simply choose to do that overnight.
You can, however, make changes gradually. With a lot of small wins that add up over time.
And then maybe when you revisit a challenge, it won’t seem quite so challenging.
To Advocates of Challenging Yourself
Perhaps you disagree. You think that growth only comes through pain, and only those who work hardest will succeed.
You may be more like the self-help authors than the self-help readers. You may love to take on difficult challenges when it comes to improving your life, and find that this is the best way to make change. You may be a super-achiever, or close to it.
That’s great! Use the strategies that are best for you. But recognize that what works best for you may not be best for others. And giving people a challenge that is beyond their capabilities then making them feel bad about themselves when they inevitably fail is not a helpful means of self-help.
Or maybe you think this take is complete garbage. That I’m only discouraging people, and everyone can benefit from being told to improve their lives in difficult ways. That failure will only give people motivation to try harder next time. That anyone can become a super-achiever with the right advice and encouragement.
That’s fine. We can still be friends. The world is a better place for having many different opinions. (Side note: Another quick win is to celebrate diversity of thought when someone disagrees with you, instead of instinctually arguing.)
If you want to attempt a more challenging approach to self-improvement, go for it. I won’t be offended, and I genuinely hope you succeed. But if you fail, don’t blame yourself.
I would just suggest you consider trying to accumulate a bunch of quick wins next time.
(Although there’s no reason not to look for quick wins while you’re attempting the more challenging strategy.)
The Easy Approach to Self-Improvement is What Works
No one change will give you your dream job, find you love, let you achieve bliss, and make you the most productive person in the world, whether it’s easy or difficult.
But difficult changes won’t accomplish anything if you don’t do them.
Whereas with many small changes, you’ll end up a lot happier, more fulfilled, more capable, more resilient, and better able to achieve your goals.
And that, ultimately, is what self-improvement should do.
