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[Music] the self-help industry is huge the industry has grown larger and larger every year from books to online courses coaching programs universities and conferences there's an endless stream of content that claims it can help you turn
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your life around and help you become the person you've always wanted it claims it can help you achieve financial independence become charismatic focused and most importantly have fulfilled and meaningful life
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the narrative behind self-help makes a lot of sense there's a strong allure to the idea that by going down this journey you can take control of your life if you optimize every second stay focused write down your goals that you'll be able to fill that void inside
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of yourself this idea is so seductive because from a young age we're taught that the more productive we are the happier we would be when i was in college i dived deeply into self-improvement i used to think that the path to self-actualization and
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fulfillment wasn't one of these books and if i had just read enough or watched enough talks my life would start to get better but after everything i went through i realized that little to nothing about myself had changed the self-help industry targets people
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who are stuck in bad times people who feel stuck and left behind people who need help fixing something about themselves which is a lot of us because being flawed is a part of the human experience and the industry takes advantage of this
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once you finish one book or course you're pushed onto the next one and then the next this creates a never-ending hunt where you consume content looking for something that's always out of grasp and then you realize that self-improvement won't actually fix anything
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there's a lot of benefits the habits that self-improvement pushes like perfecting your schedule so that you can make use of every second of your day meditating so that you have clear mind journaling so that you can remember the past writing down your goals so that you
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know where you want to go all these tools have helped me but in a way learning about self-improvement is another form of procrastination distracting you from what would actually help you as i've gotten older i've learned that the most effective way to
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improve yourself is to go after your problems and tackle them head-on imagine reading a book about basketball but never actually playing or spending years watching youtube videos about cooking but never actually making a meal you would stay in an abstract world and
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your skills would never improve you would stay in the same place you'll see this with the most successful people in history they didn't read books about success and analyze every microscopic detail they went out and did what made them afraid they made mistakes
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learned from them and eventually they stopped making mistakes and started making history the progress i have made in my life didn't come from reading books or taking courses it came from me trying new experiences and forcing myself out of my comfort zone
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one of the books i remember reading was how to win friends and influence people by dale carnegie people told me how this book would help me become more social and charismatic but didn't do much what actually helped me was going out
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and interacting with people taking every opportunity i could to step out of my comfort zone right now i'm working on a project where i'm trying to document the human experience i'm meeting strangers and interviewing them about deeply personal
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questions i asked them what advice they would give to a stranger what memory they would want to relive and how they found meaning in their lives by doing this i had to teach myself to communicate effectively in a short time frame while gaining other people's trust
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and asking them to open up about deeply personal topics this experience and the countless interactions i've had have taught me to be a better communicator than what any book could have taught me i've learned that the fastest way to grow is to go out and do the things that
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you're trying to do do it badly but force yourself to do it past the experiences that make you afraid but if you push forward you'll eventually see improvement the last thing i've learned is that life is more than being productive
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productivity helps you to create but it doesn't equal happiness there are things that can't be measured or optimized it's hard to put a price on dinner with your family building deep connections and making lasting memories these aren't things
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that you can get from a book or a course we just have to go out and experience them for ourselves
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