Something about not being young anymore is that I am much more comfortable leveraging small changes consistently over time. When I was 16, the idea of doing a little bit of practicing vocal exercises each day in order to improve over time would have seemed an insurmountable challenge. I needed things to improve over the course of days or hours. (In this, I was terribly short-sighted).
But now that I'm considerably older than that, I can mentally afford to allocate a little bit of time over the next six months toward achieving a goal like improving my typing, or getting better at vocal onsets. Being better at something a year or two from now feels very worthwhile, and I know I'll be at that future me fairly quickly.
It would have been better for me, of course, to have gained this ability back when I had lots of time at my disposal. But I can still have an impact because I can be the drop of water shaping the stone over time.
I'm doing something similar. I've decided at 62 to learn to play the keyboard and be able to read music. It's late in the day but I'm slowly getting there 30 minutes a day.
I don't know if it's age or not (I'm no spring chicken), but I do the same. As an example, I became quite skilled with the slingshot exactly this way. I set up a target catchbox between my office and my kitchen, and for a couple of years now, I take a couple of practice shots when I go between the two, or when I'm waiting for the microwave to finish, etc.
It was a year or so of doing this before I became a consistently good shot. Not quick, but if I had tried to set aside longer blocks of practice time, I wouldn't have done it at all.
Slow progress gets you to the finish line. No progress does not.
> When I was 16, the idea of doing a little bit of practicing vocal exercises each day in order to improve over time would have seemed an insurmountable challenge.
And this is probably true of most 16 y/o.
I work as a collaborative pianist, which means essentially “accompanist”; so I work with young musicians a lot. This transition to tolerating and embracing slow incremental work in service of a larger goal is what distinguishes those kids who are successful from those who get stuck. But it’s really a mindset that they can acquire at any point. Some are ready earlier than others.
I try to get the students I work with to adopt at least the habit of reflecting on their practice by writing down three things each day: Where did I put in honest effort? Where did I experience some resulting success? And where did I make some measurable progress? So E,S,P prompts. It’s based on the work of psychologist Nate Zinsser. The idea is to make visible the input and output of slow incremental effort.
Exact same mindset change happened with me (and I wish I had known the power of small changes over time earlier). I picked up the guitar at the age of 33 and just playing 15-30mins a day over a year has led to so much improvement. The slow but steady process is so rewarding.
I say that its the exact same situation for me. Except by being older, I'm only 25 now. My suspicion is that this effect to due to my prefrontal cortex maturing? Because I'm much more introspective and meticulous now when it comes to learning, thinking, feeling etc.
At 25, this is a superpower. Even if you just practice a thing for 10 minutes a day, by the time you're in your 40s (which is about when life starts getting really good) you will be fantastic at it.
For me the increased awareness of time has been a double-edged sword. More patience for slow progress and sustained practice, maybe; but there's also come a much greater awareness of the immense investment of time it takes to reach mastery, which leaves me feeling like it's usually not worth beginning at all.
I'm at the point where I feel fed up with too much talk about self-improvement. It's ok to not be productive and just enjoy things. Enjoy relationships, the sunshine, even video games or something that is literally a waste of time.
Maybe I got burned out by goal-setting and productivity talk. It also might be some remnants of some mild depression I had lately. I guess I just don't like feeling pressured to constantly improve, otherwise I'm not "living 100%" like I should be.
So when I read things like this, it grates my nerves:
>> "In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother."
It suggests the inverse: that if you're not improving, you're less of a human being. I'm not sure if the author meant it that way, but that's definitely the way I took it.
Contentment is a real thing, and valuable. There's a balance between trying to improve and being ok with how you are in your life right now. I think North American society takes things a bit too far down the side of self improvement.
If you take my 12 step course, you too can learn how to level up your Contentment Quotient. If you act now we'll also throw in a free weight loss program!
My understanding is that the larger culture context, in which our worth is determined by our value as a worker, would be the locus of that feeling. Like, I really don't feel like a "better" person because I learned how to use the CLI more efficiently.
I may even find the term "better" in that context to be offensive: I'm not better because I learned how to deal with the shambling tower of shit that is WordPress at the institutional level. I enjoy the money and the security of a job, but I hate that my security is premised on my willingness to put up with that shitty system.
Ironically, the way that I've dealt with my own feelings about this has been to lean into dumb crap that obviously has no value in a larger context.
Learning chess or getting better at math are a couple of examples of things that it just felt fun and freeing to be better at, simply because I like them. Lately it's been card manipulations.
I've leaned into playing a lot of musical instruments, and I am fortunate to work from home as I play literally all day.
And that's been somewhat freeing because as much as I enjoy the feeling of improving some of my skills, that enjoyment has been often leveraged against me to get me to do jobs I hate. Like, I've spent a lot of time fixing dumb stuff just because I have learned how to enjoy the process, but since it's dumb stuff it's a bit soul crushing to do it unless I just want to do it.
In that context, I feel like I can draw a line between the stuff that really is fun and useful to me and the stuff I'm able to grind on because that's what I was trained to do.
That distinction has made my practice on a lot of things (from music to working on getting better at relating to people) feel more liberating and less like shitty hustle culture.
I feel like there's a difference of kind between the hyper-competitive "you must be better at this to Be Productive" and what's being espoused here.
I've always been a tinkerer and all that. Rarely with any goal in mind, either; like the author of this blog post, it's always been practice for the sake of it. As I've gotten older, though, the benefits of that tinkering have been accruing over time. It lends itself to a more thorough understanding of the world, which helps in little concrete ways--if you asked me how much I know about mechanical systems I'd say "nothing" but in truth I can get by pretty well from servicing small woodworking tools and from designing stuff for a 3D printer--to the large--having a deeper understanding of why the world is the way it is through history and philosophy and political science.
I do a lot of this practice. I would also say that I'm pretty happy and, in most ways, content with where my life is. Doing more, at that point, is internal practice, not external competition. It's mind-and-soul exercise. And practicing saying no, practicing relaxation, counts too. Just, like with everything else--don't do that too much.
Self-improvement might be a 'productive' use of time in the capacity that it is viewed as a positive, but it's not defined exactly by productivity qua work. "Enjoying relationships" and sunshine is self-improvement for those who don't; you literally just said something prescriptive, which requires action, which makes it productive.
Take therapy for instance, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The whole point is to help you stop agonizing and indulging distorted thinking, to let go of things so you can better enjoy your life. That's self-improvement.
The problem with the rhetoric I see here is it's used as a deflection against change, when something's wrong. A bait-and-switch tactic. "Why worry about grinding away at juggling therapy and eating real food and doing the bare minimum exercise to stay healthy? Let's not stress ourselves. Drinking myself stupid 'sparks joy', I'll just not think about it, life is short [insert aphorism]".
I think there's an important difference between slowing down to enjoy life and making rationalizations against fixing problems.
I think the important thing is to find a balance that satisfies you. If you never do any self improvement, you might be missing out on a much better life that would cost you relatively little to get to. But maybe your current life is hunky-dory, in which case, that's great, you do you!
And over-focus on "self-improvement" may mean you miss out on things along the way. Making yourself miss those things may be more of a decline than improvement for you.
I'd only add that, in my opinion, self-improvement should be a joy in itself, not a burden or drudgery. If it's not joyful, what's the point?
Even if it's just to further your career goals (which it shouldn't be just that), the lack of joy in doing it might be a strong hint that your career goals are not well-aligned with your personality.
> In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother.
I mean it’s hard to argue that you should do things that get in the way of this pursuit.
I agree with your sentiment, but I think your definition of self-improvement is off if it doesn’t include leisure, because finding healthy ways of incorporating leisure into your life definitely makes your “path” “smoother”.
Like, my ideal self isn’t a 100x engineer that sleeps at the office most nights. My ideal self spends time with his family, and cares for friends even if they don’t offer me anything tangible, and has hobbies that won’t result in measurable benefits to my “productivity”. So doing those things is self-improvement because I’m moving towards my own definition of success.
> It's ok to not be productive and just enjoy things. Enjoy relationships, the sunshine, even video games or something that is literally a waste of time.
That's not so easy for some folks, at least at first. Not until they... practice ;)
> It's ok to not be productive and just enjoy things.
It's not only OK, it's absolutely essential.
> if you're not improving, you're less of a human being
I don't think that's the message that you should take. Your value as a human being is independent of all that. However, I think there's an element of truth to "if you're not growing, you're dying."
There are plenty examples of people who took that attitude and aren’t/weren’t good humans.
You are good enough as you are. Sure, there is a better version of yourself and everyday is an opportunity to be a little better BUT your value as a human has NOTHING to do with any of this shit.
> that if you're not improving, you're less of a human being.
If you're not improving, then you're not improving. What more is there to that? If you had improved, maybe you'd be a better human, or not. Maybe you've transcended the idea and by not improving you grow to be a better human. Regardless of the scenario, it's your ego that is the judge.
> if you're not improving, you're less of a human being
I mean, it's true. The version of you that was a couch potato for four hours on a Saturday is less good than the version that went for a run, lifted weights, home-brewed beer, met someone for coffee, or whatever self-improvement you might have done. (I don't agree that enjoying relationships is contrary to self-improvement.) Of course, opportunity cost is a thing, and we will never know what action or inaction you took was the "best" or "right" one.
The better way to approach it, in my view, is to accept the fact that if you're not improving and being productive, in some ways you are indeed a worse version of you than you could be; but in the Stoic tradition, to divorce that fact from how you feel about it emotionally -- as you said, it's OK. Perhaps you can trend towards being better without self-flagellating when you're not.
Productivity making you better or worse makes a needless moral judgement. What's better is that being productive allows you to accomplish the things you want.
Then the real question becomes about your goals, rather than some vague ideas of "work". I think it's better to really consider what you want and don't want, and genuinely accept them. The productivity scale is not some inherent moral metric. This shrouds the intent of productivity, which is to accomplish goals.
So you're not worse if you're not being productive, but you are worse if you aren't accomplish whatever goals you have for yourself. Not because it's some moral failure but simply accomplishing goals feels good and not accomplishing them feels bad. Further the goals themselves aren't universal. They're merely reflections of your innate desires, which you have to accept. If you feel like you weren't "productive", it's probably closer to say that you feel bad for not achieving what you set out to do.
The simple problem here I think is goal setting. Not solely productivity itself.
> The version of you that was a couch potato for four hours on a Saturday is less good than the version that went for a run, lifted weights, home-brewed beer, met someone for coffee, or whatever self-improvement you might have done.
How so? I see many people assert this, but I've yet to see someone be able to articulate why (that isn't trivially refutable).
Are we measuring by happiness? Contentment? External validation? Popularity? Legacy? Fitness? Total number of experiences? Something else? And, for any chosen metric, why is that metric important?
There is no objective "good", only "good for whom". Even widely accepted qualities like money, character, physical health - they are good to the person that has them, but only if they themselves desire such things.
If a person desires peace and quiet and a vacation, then getting up at 6am to go to gym and spending time grinding leetcode is not good for them, it's a burden.
You forget the importance of rest itself in self improvement.
Understanding how to improve, is a lifelong journey. Understanding how much to work, how much to rest, how much to sharpen the sword, how much you can mix those things... and how all this interplays with your personal factors is essential to get the most from yourself.
Sometimes... Watching TV and not seeing your friends, or whatever is the RIGHT thing to do. And we should have 0 shame about it when it is. I'll admit video games are my vice over TV in general. But there's times when I've gone too hard... and even gaming may be too taxing for what I can take.
The 25-30 yr old version of myself who was super driven, deadly fit, focused and high achieving in chosen hobby was not a better version of me.
It was a version that was a lot more free, less responsibility, way more selfish, self centered and egotistical.
I've become a 'handyman' in the way that this article alludes to. A big problem that I come across when saying "yes" to every problem that peaks my curiosity is that Ive become mentally drained.
I end up spending a lot of time and energy hacking away at problems. The problem is, it seems like my mind isn't resilient enough to keep up with it. After a certain point there comes an onset of fatigue, frustration, and just general feelings of discomfort that drones on in the back of my conscious.
I guess this is to be expected. The muscles of my mind have been overexerted and need rest. A remedy to this is to "go with the flow" of my mood/feelings. Which sometimes contradicts my undying feeling of curiosity. It becomes a balancing act between the two.
My overall philosophy about attaining skills is that for most of them, I am content with learning something well enough that I could muddle through if I had to do it for real. I'm not shooting for becoming an expert at all.
I aim for expertise in the much smaller subset of skills that are of genuine value to me.
I aim at being a "jack of all trades, master of a couple".
I used to suffer of the same and then went with the time limiting: I can't do that stuff on weekends or after 7 pm, I stick to it and it became a habit in few weeks time.
I used to play pool a fair amount and it reminds me of a quote an older player shared with me one time: "Every shot is a practice shot". His point was that every time you shot you were building up either good or bad habits, so every time you shoot you were to shoot the same way. Don't ever just "fuck around" because that contributes to bad habits or at least not building good habits.
Pre-shot routines come into play to help with that I think. To take every shot with the same level of seriousness and preparation, whatever the position is.
For the last few years, I want to play pool more and more, but going to a club is such a drag for me. Especially when alone. A home with a pool table would be great.
A few frames of six-ball every few hours as a break from work...
My perspective on programming shifted heavily when I adopted this idea for myself. Fully accepting the idea that there is no end to my learning and growth freed my mind so much and has actually made it easier to learn and grow.
I really liked this -- it's so true about my road to programming (pseudo-) expertise. Almost everything I've been paid to do, I first did on a hobby level, just messing around with my own projects and ideas.
> There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.
There is a finish line, but I think the goal post moves over and over and over again. Historically, every time I set a goal, I would think to myself, "once I do/get/achieve X, I'll be happy." In retrospective, I care less about the goal and find myself most joyful throughout the process of achieving said goal.
I don't think you're disagreeing with what you quote. Constantly moving the finish line is functionally the same as there being no finish line. The "finish line" becomes a milestone instead of an end.
> I care less about the goal and find myself most joyful throughout the process of achieving said goal.
People often misunderstand the concept of "enlightenment" by thinking of it as an end state to be achieved. It's not. "Enlightenment" is not an achievable goal, it's a direction to walk along your path. The real thing is the walking of the path itself.
Let's not forget some of the origins of this wisdom:
- Aristotle's distinction between activities/beings that are an end in themselves vs. activities that end with the achievement of their goals, and the realization that one activity can be both
- Buddhist practice of focusing on the activity of mind
Both address directly what this article does indirectly: the brain's reward system prunes reality and self-expression as necessary to get things done, so often improvement comes only after deconstructing those blinders. And that in turn is super, super difficult, and virtually never happens unless it has to, because someone is traumatized by reward-system-induced failures like addiction, violence, social ostracism, personal shame, etc. In the "best" case, one's compassion for others' suffering sensitizes one to sniff and shun reward-system fast-paths.
It's ALWAYS better to avoid reward-system hysteresis, since it's almost never fixable. And remember, the more capable and well-funded you are, the less the environment will offer any guardrails. It's all on you.
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But now that I'm considerably older than that, I can mentally afford to allocate a little bit of time over the next six months toward achieving a goal like improving my typing, or getting better at vocal onsets. Being better at something a year or two from now feels very worthwhile, and I know I'll be at that future me fairly quickly.
It would have been better for me, of course, to have gained this ability back when I had lots of time at my disposal. But I can still have an impact because I can be the drop of water shaping the stone over time.
Anything you can do that brings you satifaction or exercises your brain and keeps it sharp is a great thing.
It was a year or so of doing this before I became a consistently good shot. Not quick, but if I had tried to set aside longer blocks of practice time, I wouldn't have done it at all.
Slow progress gets you to the finish line. No progress does not.
And this is probably true of most 16 y/o.
I work as a collaborative pianist, which means essentially “accompanist”; so I work with young musicians a lot. This transition to tolerating and embracing slow incremental work in service of a larger goal is what distinguishes those kids who are successful from those who get stuck. But it’s really a mindset that they can acquire at any point. Some are ready earlier than others.
I try to get the students I work with to adopt at least the habit of reflecting on their practice by writing down three things each day: Where did I put in honest effort? Where did I experience some resulting success? And where did I make some measurable progress? So E,S,P prompts. It’s based on the work of psychologist Nate Zinsser. The idea is to make visible the input and output of slow incremental effort.
Maybe I got burned out by goal-setting and productivity talk. It also might be some remnants of some mild depression I had lately. I guess I just don't like feeling pressured to constantly improve, otherwise I'm not "living 100%" like I should be.
So when I read things like this, it grates my nerves: >> "In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother."
It suggests the inverse: that if you're not improving, you're less of a human being. I'm not sure if the author meant it that way, but that's definitely the way I took it.
If you take my 12 step course, you too can learn how to level up your Contentment Quotient. If you act now we'll also throw in a free weight loss program!
My understanding is that the larger culture context, in which our worth is determined by our value as a worker, would be the locus of that feeling. Like, I really don't feel like a "better" person because I learned how to use the CLI more efficiently.
I may even find the term "better" in that context to be offensive: I'm not better because I learned how to deal with the shambling tower of shit that is WordPress at the institutional level. I enjoy the money and the security of a job, but I hate that my security is premised on my willingness to put up with that shitty system.
Ironically, the way that I've dealt with my own feelings about this has been to lean into dumb crap that obviously has no value in a larger context.
Learning chess or getting better at math are a couple of examples of things that it just felt fun and freeing to be better at, simply because I like them. Lately it's been card manipulations.
I've leaned into playing a lot of musical instruments, and I am fortunate to work from home as I play literally all day.
And that's been somewhat freeing because as much as I enjoy the feeling of improving some of my skills, that enjoyment has been often leveraged against me to get me to do jobs I hate. Like, I've spent a lot of time fixing dumb stuff just because I have learned how to enjoy the process, but since it's dumb stuff it's a bit soul crushing to do it unless I just want to do it.
In that context, I feel like I can draw a line between the stuff that really is fun and useful to me and the stuff I'm able to grind on because that's what I was trained to do.
That distinction has made my practice on a lot of things (from music to working on getting better at relating to people) feel more liberating and less like shitty hustle culture.
I've always been a tinkerer and all that. Rarely with any goal in mind, either; like the author of this blog post, it's always been practice for the sake of it. As I've gotten older, though, the benefits of that tinkering have been accruing over time. It lends itself to a more thorough understanding of the world, which helps in little concrete ways--if you asked me how much I know about mechanical systems I'd say "nothing" but in truth I can get by pretty well from servicing small woodworking tools and from designing stuff for a 3D printer--to the large--having a deeper understanding of why the world is the way it is through history and philosophy and political science.
I do a lot of this practice. I would also say that I'm pretty happy and, in most ways, content with where my life is. Doing more, at that point, is internal practice, not external competition. It's mind-and-soul exercise. And practicing saying no, practicing relaxation, counts too. Just, like with everything else--don't do that too much.
Self-improvement might be a 'productive' use of time in the capacity that it is viewed as a positive, but it's not defined exactly by productivity qua work. "Enjoying relationships" and sunshine is self-improvement for those who don't; you literally just said something prescriptive, which requires action, which makes it productive.
Take therapy for instance, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The whole point is to help you stop agonizing and indulging distorted thinking, to let go of things so you can better enjoy your life. That's self-improvement.
The problem with the rhetoric I see here is it's used as a deflection against change, when something's wrong. A bait-and-switch tactic. "Why worry about grinding away at juggling therapy and eating real food and doing the bare minimum exercise to stay healthy? Let's not stress ourselves. Drinking myself stupid 'sparks joy', I'll just not think about it, life is short [insert aphorism]".
I think there's an important difference between slowing down to enjoy life and making rationalizations against fixing problems.
And over-focus on "self-improvement" may mean you miss out on things along the way. Making yourself miss those things may be more of a decline than improvement for you.
I'd only add that, in my opinion, self-improvement should be a joy in itself, not a burden or drudgery. If it's not joyful, what's the point?
Even if it's just to further your career goals (which it shouldn't be just that), the lack of joy in doing it might be a strong hint that your career goals are not well-aligned with your personality.
I mean it’s hard to argue that you should do things that get in the way of this pursuit.
I agree with your sentiment, but I think your definition of self-improvement is off if it doesn’t include leisure, because finding healthy ways of incorporating leisure into your life definitely makes your “path” “smoother”.
Like, my ideal self isn’t a 100x engineer that sleeps at the office most nights. My ideal self spends time with his family, and cares for friends even if they don’t offer me anything tangible, and has hobbies that won’t result in measurable benefits to my “productivity”. So doing those things is self-improvement because I’m moving towards my own definition of success.
That's not so easy for some folks, at least at first. Not until they... practice ;)
It's not only OK, it's absolutely essential.
> if you're not improving, you're less of a human being
I don't think that's the message that you should take. Your value as a human being is independent of all that. However, I think there's an element of truth to "if you're not growing, you're dying."
You are good enough as you are. Sure, there is a better version of yourself and everyday is an opportunity to be a little better BUT your value as a human has NOTHING to do with any of this shit.
Time for rest and recovery is good.
If you're not improving, then you're not improving. What more is there to that? If you had improved, maybe you'd be a better human, or not. Maybe you've transcended the idea and by not improving you grow to be a better human. Regardless of the scenario, it's your ego that is the judge.
I mean, it's true. The version of you that was a couch potato for four hours on a Saturday is less good than the version that went for a run, lifted weights, home-brewed beer, met someone for coffee, or whatever self-improvement you might have done. (I don't agree that enjoying relationships is contrary to self-improvement.) Of course, opportunity cost is a thing, and we will never know what action or inaction you took was the "best" or "right" one.
The better way to approach it, in my view, is to accept the fact that if you're not improving and being productive, in some ways you are indeed a worse version of you than you could be; but in the Stoic tradition, to divorce that fact from how you feel about it emotionally -- as you said, it's OK. Perhaps you can trend towards being better without self-flagellating when you're not.
Then the real question becomes about your goals, rather than some vague ideas of "work". I think it's better to really consider what you want and don't want, and genuinely accept them. The productivity scale is not some inherent moral metric. This shrouds the intent of productivity, which is to accomplish goals.
So you're not worse if you're not being productive, but you are worse if you aren't accomplish whatever goals you have for yourself. Not because it's some moral failure but simply accomplishing goals feels good and not accomplishing them feels bad. Further the goals themselves aren't universal. They're merely reflections of your innate desires, which you have to accept. If you feel like you weren't "productive", it's probably closer to say that you feel bad for not achieving what you set out to do.
The simple problem here I think is goal setting. Not solely productivity itself.
How so? I see many people assert this, but I've yet to see someone be able to articulate why (that isn't trivially refutable).
Are we measuring by happiness? Contentment? External validation? Popularity? Legacy? Fitness? Total number of experiences? Something else? And, for any chosen metric, why is that metric important?
If a person desires peace and quiet and a vacation, then getting up at 6am to go to gym and spending time grinding leetcode is not good for them, it's a burden.
You forget the importance of rest itself in self improvement.
Understanding how to improve, is a lifelong journey. Understanding how much to work, how much to rest, how much to sharpen the sword, how much you can mix those things... and how all this interplays with your personal factors is essential to get the most from yourself.
Sometimes... Watching TV and not seeing your friends, or whatever is the RIGHT thing to do. And we should have 0 shame about it when it is. I'll admit video games are my vice over TV in general. But there's times when I've gone too hard... and even gaming may be too taxing for what I can take.
The internal judge is à dangerous beast.
"who the world wants you to be" from the OP.
This is toxic positivity.
There's a place for feedback loops whether you label it tldr; GPT, sensemaking, or dislike.
I end up spending a lot of time and energy hacking away at problems. The problem is, it seems like my mind isn't resilient enough to keep up with it. After a certain point there comes an onset of fatigue, frustration, and just general feelings of discomfort that drones on in the back of my conscious.
I guess this is to be expected. The muscles of my mind have been overexerted and need rest. A remedy to this is to "go with the flow" of my mood/feelings. Which sometimes contradicts my undying feeling of curiosity. It becomes a balancing act between the two.
I dunno ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I aim for expertise in the much smaller subset of skills that are of genuine value to me.
I aim at being a "jack of all trades, master of a couple".
For the last few years, I want to play pool more and more, but going to a club is such a drag for me. Especially when alone. A home with a pool table would be great.
A few frames of six-ball every few hours as a break from work...
This is a really key point about practice. "Practice" doesn't automatically mean improvement -- it can just as easily lock in the opposite.
You have to actively practice. That is, you have to analyze your performance and consciously practice changes that lead to improvement.
It mentions how people that took self-defense classes would hand a gun back to their assailant after disarming them, and that stuck with me.
There is a finish line, but I think the goal post moves over and over and over again. Historically, every time I set a goal, I would think to myself, "once I do/get/achieve X, I'll be happy." In retrospective, I care less about the goal and find myself most joyful throughout the process of achieving said goal.
> I care less about the goal and find myself most joyful throughout the process of achieving said goal.
People often misunderstand the concept of "enlightenment" by thinking of it as an end state to be achieved. It's not. "Enlightenment" is not an achievable goal, it's a direction to walk along your path. The real thing is the walking of the path itself.
- Aristotle's distinction between activities/beings that are an end in themselves vs. activities that end with the achievement of their goals, and the realization that one activity can be both
- Buddhist practice of focusing on the activity of mind
Both address directly what this article does indirectly: the brain's reward system prunes reality and self-expression as necessary to get things done, so often improvement comes only after deconstructing those blinders. And that in turn is super, super difficult, and virtually never happens unless it has to, because someone is traumatized by reward-system-induced failures like addiction, violence, social ostracism, personal shame, etc. In the "best" case, one's compassion for others' suffering sensitizes one to sniff and shun reward-system fast-paths.
It's ALWAYS better to avoid reward-system hysteresis, since it's almost never fixable. And remember, the more capable and well-funded you are, the less the environment will offer any guardrails. It's all on you.