The Self-Improvement Trap

Self-improvement can ruin your life. Here's how you can avoid that.

I know all too well how it usually goes: You start your self-improvement journey and begin to see the bad habits you carry with you. Maybe you’re not waking up as early as you'd like. Maybe you drink a little bit too much. Maybe you’re addicted to nicotine. Maybe you procrastinate too much. You enjoy video-games more than you should. You don’t work out nearly enough.

So you set out to fix those things. You start to follow self-improvement accounts, bodybuilders, business influencers, sales gurus. You read every article. You listen to every podcast. If you’re really committed, you buy every book. You invest in some courses. You are 100% determined to improve. You are addicted to it. You are hooked, and your life has, finally, a clear direction.

You go from 0-60% really quickly. You go from lazy and unmotivated to disciplined, structured, and driven. This is a great step. You feel good, look better, and are finding in the very pursuit of improvement a purpose that sustains you through the trials of life. Your entire life changes in a matter of months. Your efforts are being rewarded. You go from 60-85%. You are now waking up early, training consistently, and procrastinating less and less. You feel on a roll.

And then, suddenly, this feeling gives way to something else. You stop feeling as driven. The way becomes a bit blurrier. You don’t find in you the same motivation. Everything becomes a bit confusing. Your life is better in every way, so what exactly is missing?

The thing is, after that initial rush, after the excitement of change slows down, as you become used to your new life, the drive you felt gives way to a sort of anxiety that tells you you ought to be doing even more. Whereas at the beginning you compared yourself to the old you, you now compare yourself to the gurus and influencers you followed at the beginning. You start feeling inadequate when you realize you’re not where they are. You compare yourself to everyone you see online, and instead of feeling grateful for what you do have you start to feel sad because you have a long way to go still —or so you think.

So you keep trying to optimize. You follow more and more accounts. You’re now consuming exclusively self-improvement content. This guru tells you to wake up earlier. This one tells you to take cold showers. This one says spending money on coffee is dumb. This other one says you cannot drink coffee at all. This one says you should have a 20 step morning routine. This other one tells you to eat carrots with every meal. One says apples. One cooks everything in beef tallow. The other one uses extra-virgin olive oil on Thursdays and Fridays. One guru says having a stable relationship and loving your girl is “beta”. The other one says you need to ignore her texts for 5/3rds of the time it took her to respond to you. Mister money guru calls you a loser for working 8 hours and not 14. High-pitched Gary screams all the time and repeats the word “grind” and “hustle” over and over. Random “badass” sales trainer says you’re a b*tch if you go out with your friends. Productivity Mike swears you’re wasting your life for taking a day off. And on and on it goes.

Your mind becomes overburdened with facts, tips, and advice. You are running an impossible race to try and find the perfectly optimize routine that will guarantee success in the shortest possible amount of time. Your brain has so much useless information that it can not focus at all. But you don’t even know what’s useful and useless anymore. Everyone claims their advice is the correct one, and if you only just did this one extra thing everything in your life would change.

What was once an exciting journey of improvement where you could see clear progress now becomes a desperate and anxious running in circles, losing all enjoyment for life as you attempt to include every single tip and advice you see online into days that feel way too short. You forgot your breath-work exercises again because you were too busy going to work. That’s what hustle guru #213 calls a loser move and now you’re not going to make it. Sorry, that’s just how it goes.

So many young men get lost in this pursuit. It’s the new rat-race. In trying to escape the unnatural modern lifestyle, they end up living an even worst one, enslaved by their micro-optimzed routines, by their comparisons, by the all-consuming anxiety that convinces them they can only enjoy their lives after they have achieved some specific level of wealth. Living like that is worse than having a boring 9 to 5, and it’s not even comparable.

Don’t believe for a second that I’m advising you to stop working on yourself. Not at all. I’m trying to help you avoid the very common pitfall that highly-driven men end up falling into. One that is very difficult to get out of and where you’ll find yourself burnt out, and very likely bitter and depressed.

What I’m trying to do is show you how ridiculous it is to live like this. To try to engineer what is too complex to be engineered: life.

It’s my intention with this article to show you what the next stage of development is, and how you can avoid falling into the self-improvement trap, which will, ironically, not only help you make more progress, but live a joyful, productive, fruitful life. One in which anxiety is no more and you are free to both work hard and enjoy the fruits of your labor, without losing your mind in the constant pursuit of that impossible perfection.

And it starts with you realizing a very simple fact: