How to Make ALL Self-Improvement EASY
The "Informed Personalization" System
No one can teach you how to live as yourself.
I am absolutely convinced that this a crucial missing piece to the puzzle of self-improvement. All of the books, videos, articles, and advice I have consumed over the years (thousands upon thousands of hours-worth) failed to emphasize one very important thing: What worked for one person will never work for another person in exactly the same way. That seems like such an obvious fact considering the countless unique variables of our identities and experiences, but the full meaning and implications of it simply weren’t evident to me until my early thirties (just a few years ago).
This isn’t to say the information or advice I gathered from examples of others was useless – far from it. What this means is that you cannot truly and completely find yourself with someone else’s eyes. Each of us has our own, perfectly unique operating system that, at some point, responds only to itself. Adopting the tools, attitudes, treatments, and practices of others may ultimately result in progress, but that progress is always a result of the way in which we adapt these tools for use with ourselves. Achieving the goals will result in progress, but the secret lies in figuring out how your body and mind can actually move toward these goals.
Let’s use a simple example, as this truth is applicable across all forms of self-improvement and care. If someone were to ask me how to become physically fit, I would advise regular physical activity along with proper nutrition. Okay… what the hell does that mean? Despite both of these things being essential to achieving optimal physical fitness, no two people will ever walk down exactly the same path to arrive there. They may engage in nearly identical activities to reach their goals, but the things which motivate and sustain consistent and effective engagement in these activities are unique to each person.
For me, exercise looks like playing sports with friends, mountain biking, taking walks, finding excuses to move around slightly more than necessary, and doing some strength training a couple times per week for forty-five minutes or so, but it didn’t always look like this. Arriving at this “regular exercise” routine was a process entirely unique to me, and if I had followed someone else’s routine (which I have more times than I can count) my body and mind would have eventually rejected it. So, while “regular exercise” was an indisputable requirement to achieving my goal, the exact path to arriving there was unique to me, and is guaranteed to fail for literally every other person who has ever lived.
This may sound like hyperbole to some, but I mean it in the most absolute and literal sense. Even if you manage to find two or more people who share the exact same routine, the things that lead to, sustain, and follow that routine will never line up perfectly. At some point, a critically important component to engaging with and sustaining the routine will differ from person to person, and that component will always reflect the unique attributes and qualities of an individual’s life and identity.
One of the primary reasons this understanding of how to best live as one’s self is lost on so many is because we are comparative, pattern-seeking, and success modeling creatures by default. We see that which others have and we do not, and we try to figure out what they did to arrive there. There’s nothing inherently wrong with success modeling of this type and, in fact, I use it myself, constantly. We can learn much from the goals and strategies of others and gain inspiration for ourselves by observing them, but there will come a point in which we must say to ourselves, “Okay, I can see the destination and some of the steps along the way, now it’s time to figure out how the wholly unique person I am can navigate myself there”.
The Space Between the Steps
We can infinitely zoom in on the steps which are most likely necessary in accomplishing anything, all the way to their most basic and fundamental components, but the space between the steps can never be perfectly replicated between individuals, and it is the space between the steps that must be discovered if we are to keep moving forward and make the most of our lives. The space between steps amounts to the inherent differences in all of us, in the pursuit of something we want, and those differences manifest from the perfectly unique peculiarities and experiences of your person; your identity.
No one else can perfectly replicate every single one of your traits, thoughts, and experiences (the sum of what makes you the unique person you are), and so no one else’s space between the steps can perfectly match your own. Only we can discover what that space looks like for us. The ultimate question is not, “How is that done?”, it is, “How can I do that?”. The mastery of the space between steps (a critical component to the mastery of your identity) must necessarily come from within, and can never be taught, borrowed, emulated, replicated, substituted, or arrived at without practice and development. This is a terrifying prospect to many people, often without them being explicitly aware of it, but it is vitally integral to the process of moving forward, knowing and loving yourself, healing, and eventually succeeding.
The discovery and utilization of the space between steps can be accomplished with a system I call, “Informed Personalization”. Informed Personalization is simply the process of educating yourself and improving your skills in pursuit of achieving a goal, then using what you have learned, along with your unique peculiarities, to personalize your process of taking the steps to achieve that goal as easily as possible. This process is intended to help you learn the invaluable skill of using your identity to your advantage in the pursuit of whatever it is you want.
This is what the process looks like, as well as a practical example included under each step:
Set a long-term self-improvement goal, then a short-term one that carries you toward the long-term
Long-term: Lose 25lbs of fat, and put on 5lbs of muscle. Short-term: lose 5lbs in the next 3 weeks
Whether on your own, or with the help of someone knowledgeable in achieving the goal you’re aiming for, determine which steps you’re going to try taking to get there (the plan)
Calorie restriction, carb decrease, protein increase, daily walks, and weight training 3 times per week
Start where you can, NOW, and personalize the process to make it as easy, enjoyable, and sustainable as possible FOR YOU (your space between steps)
Calorie restriction by prohibiting snacking after 7pm and throwing away the unhealthy snacks in my house, carb decrease by cutting my daily soda, protein increase by eating more lean meat, 20 min walk a few days per week, not ready for lifting weights yet.
Some ideas on how to personalize the process:
What are you good and bad at? Leverage your skills to help improve the ones that might need work.
What do you hate, and what do you enjoy? Again, leverage what you enjoy. If there’s something you hate, but need to do, it can help to use what you enjoy to develop your tolerance of what you don’t.
What are your idiosyncrasies? Use your unique peculiarities to your advantage by structuring your plan to include their use. If you’re detail-oriented, pick or create a plan that allows that trait to shine.
Be stubborn, but leave room for experimentation. Don’t allow someone else to ultimately determine what can and cannot work for you. It is often better to go your own route, fail, then adjust where necessary, instead of following someone else’s path from the beginning, and being lost from the start.
What needs to be included in your plan for it to be sustainable? Sustainability is the key to success in any long-term self-improvement endeavor. We need to challenge ourselves, but not so much that we sabotage our chance at success.
What are some of your past successes, and what is it about the way you approached them that helped you to succeed? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Self-educate (inform) yourself as you move forward and make progress
One YouTube fitness/nutrition video each morning, finding good coaches/teachers to follow, asking physically fit friends for advice and inspiration.
Use what you’re learning to make adjustments where they are needed, whether to the space between your steps, or the steps themselves. Keep what works, set aside what doesn’t (maybe try it again later)
Decided to try keto and cut out most carbs, not drinking any calories, getting 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight each day, throwing out all the junk food in my house since I haven’t been good at avoiding snacking on it, skipping breakfast in the mornings, doing bodyweight exercises to build myself up to feeling ready to workout in the gym.
Whether they realize it or not, every single person who has ever succeeded in any endeavor has gone through this process to some degree. It is a natural feature of the human condition, as no two people are precisely the same and, regardless of what we are doing, some part of ourselves must be included. Those who succeed are simply effectively including themselves in the process, while those who fail tend to leave parts of themselves behind.
As I mentioned, discovering and mastering your space between steps simply cannot be replicated or taught, period. It may share plenty of similarities with others who have found success, but the similarities are the easy part. The difficulty in this process comes when we find ourselves following the path we expect to work (usually because we believe it worked for others) only to find ourselves running headfirst into an inevitable wall. The wall can quite literally be anything, as its existence is solely the result of the indefinable discrepancy between your expectations of success, and the reality of your unique self. So, just like with your space, your walls are unique to you as well. This is why truth and self-honesty are such critically necessary components to self-improvement, but that’s a topic for another post.
The wall we will all run into is also a necessary part of the process because it forces us to stop and ask ourselves, “What got in the way, and how do I move past it?”. No one falls into the mastery, or even a basic understanding of their identity without encountering difficult obstacles, and to imagine this is possible is to deny your identity the necessary opportunity to inform you of how to understand, develop, accept, and live it.
I believe the human condition is automatically on an upward trajectory from the moment of birth. It is our job to identify when something gets in its way, and to develop the skill of overcoming obstacles as they inevitably arise. No one is born with a mind which inherently seeks, yearns for, and engages in its own destruction.
Once we have identified what gets in the way, we gain the ability to zoom in a little further and operate within more of our own space. This space is often terrifying to contend with, as it is largely unknown and unfamiliar, but rarely even a fraction as difficult as we convince ourselves it will be. Identifying and traversing the space is a skill which cannot be taught. That skill is called living as yourself, and if you want to get good at it, you have to practice it in your own unique way.
This is the unfortunate pitfall of self-help advice in general. The skill you must necessarily develop is living as yourself, but the advice we often find has the unfortunate effect of encouraging us to develop the skills of living as someone else; someone who appears to have what we want. We imagine that adopting the qualities and actions of the identities of others, or forcing our identities into a desirable path designed by someone other than ourselves, will somehow result in healthy authenticity and success. I can promise you that this cannot and will never work. Your authenticity and identity necessarily demand that you develop the skill of knowing, developing, and accepting them on your own, and they will not tolerate the paths of others, no matter how much you desire them to, or how good it can temporarily feel to imagine this path will lead you to happiness.
Commit to accepting and developing your unique identity, as well as ensuring you include it in whatever self-improvement process you’re engaging in, and I promise it will make the process infinitely easier. It may be difficult at first but, the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it, and the more effortless it will become to utilize effectively throughout your life. Trust me, it’s going to be a LOT more easier and more fulfilling than you can imagine.
Get started!