Leave The Self-Improvement Trap
Continuous learning. Reading the next book. Watching the 100th YouTube video.
You want to push your comfort zone.
Run longer than ever before. Start your own business. Become great at a new skill. You start to learn. You go from learning to learning.
6 months later you are still “learning” without having taken action.
You are stuck in a loop of endless learning without application.
Today, I will go over how I try to get out of this loop by myself. You will learn why a vision is important. The great upside of an experiment. And that you should be able to explain anything you learned in simple terms.
The Trap
Curiosity is my biggest driver, but also my worst enemy.
I get an idea and my brain instantly lights up in excitement.
A few years ago I had the idea of an app for runners. I just moved from Munich to Tegernsee (in essence from a big city to a small mountain town). I wanted to meet new people to run with.
The idea:
Define a route, a starting time and a pace range.
An algorithm would match you with runners of a similar pace.
You have a chat to organise further.
You meet for a nice run.
That’s it.
So the app is called…
It does not exist.
I got lost. I got lost in learning how to do it up to my standard.
I am a software developer working in the games industry. App development is similar, but different. I needed to learn another programming language.
I quickly found myself in a trap of wanting to know it all:
How do I properly authenticate users?
How do I structure user data in the database, so it’s future proof when I want to add new features?
How do I advertise the app?
How do I …?
I should have asked myself “Why don’t I just start”?
After a few weeks I stopped and got interested in something else.
I could tell you many stories. Countless game ideas I started, countless business ideas I had that never got an honest try, but you get the point.
In fact, this weekly letter is the first thing that I work on consistently next to my day job.
If you can relate to my story, I feel you.
The initial excitement. You feel motivated to learn and dive right in. You learn more about the field. You don’t stop learning.
You don’t know everything, so you might overlook a crucial point, right?
That is the trap.
We follow an endless circle of learning without applying what we just learned.
Are you buying the next book about the same topic after you just finished one? Have you even applied the learnings from the one you just read? Or remember what was talked about?
Humans learn by doing. Regardless of your learning style, if you don’t use the information you will forget it.
Consistent doing is the only way to get better at something.
Do. Really do. Reading is only doing until you reach the first actionable point. After that it’s wasted effort. You don’t need to know the rest. You need to apply what you learn and have your own experiences. Thinking how you would implement it, isn’t doing.
I am trapped in the same loop. I suck at applying what I read in books. I watch too many YouTube tutorials before I step into action. But I get better at taking action.
Ironically, action by action.
Envision
Walking without a direction is wandering. There is a time to wander, but when you want to do you need to know where you want to go.
As you read before I fall in the trap of wanting to know.
I want to know how I can do in the best way.
I need a mindset shift.
First
Where are you going? Why do you want it? What will the future look like when you have reached it?
Don’t limit yourself.
Second
You have your vision in mind. With that vision we will now find out how to reach it.
Write down every step that you need to take to reach it.
Here is the twist: Don’t write down what you need to know; write down what you need to do.
Focus on the action. You still have to learn, but it will be driven by action.
Easiest is to start from the vision. There action is broad and undefined. The closer you get to today, the more concrete the actions become.
It’s like a pyramid. Few actions on top, many on the bottom.
You know you arrived at the bottom if you have no “I can’t do this because of this…” anymore.
Third
This might be counterproductive but you need to understand that you might never leave the bottom of the pyramid.
The bottom has all the actions that you can start today. You should have control of those actions. It’s your responsibility alone to do them.
Once you did step into action you will find that your next actions are too broad (as you are moving up the pyramid) and you need to break them down into smaller actions. You will widen the base again.
This loop might repeat itself endlessly. The vision you are striving for might never arrive. The only thing you can do is to trust that if you do the actions you will move forward. Everything else is out of your control.
I envision myself having my own business. Helping people to see their own value. The value in working on something for a prolonged period of time because they love the act, not the outcome.
Can I control that this will ever happen? No.
Can I step into action today that will help me become better so that I might be able to help someone? Yes.
To be honest, I am struggling with an example right here and now.
My mind tells me that I am already way too comfortable with what I do right now. I write this newsletter to learn writing. I am becoming a certified mental trainer.
I could already start trying to find people that want to work with me. It would be in my control. But I resist. I assume I don’t know enough. Which brings me back to my initial trouble. I need to step into action.
The next step is how I try to do it.
Experiment
Having systems for what I do on a regular basis helps me keep consistent. I know exactly when I write. I do it every day.
That being said, like I mentioned before, I have a hard time stepping out of my comfort zone. I have bursts of energy where I can do it. And then I slowly creep back into my shell.
It feels safe. I know I need to feel uncomfortable. I have no problem feeling it during running. I have not figured out why I have trouble doing it when it comes to my work.
I suspect fear of failure. My inner dialogue runs rampart when I create. I fear that I don’t see the point in it in a few weeks from now. I sabotage myself by thinking about something that lies in the future that isn’t even true.
I do write.
Why is the headline for this section “Experiment”, and what does it all have to do with what I just said?
An experiment can not fail—Hah. Perfect.
Think about it. If an experiment is done there are exactly two outcomes.
Your experiment succeeds, or
You learn something
An experiment has to fulfil the following criteria:
It is easy to set up and do
It has little to no downside
There is a huge potential upside
I never did the experiment before
I will learn something from the experiment
By following those rules (which I openly steal from James Altucher’s book Skip the Line), I build a learning right into it.
I can detach from the fear that I will fail. I can go into the experiment with curiosity. I will learn something from it. Even if it does not work out.
A few weeks back the intro of this newsletter changed. I thought about experimenting with using the same template for my introduction each week. Telling you what today’s letter is about and explaining why it’s such a big problem. Leading into what you will learn.
You should know what it’s about right after the first section, so you can decide if you dive deeper or not.
I wanted to learn if I can fit any topic into such a rigid structure. As of now I can say, yes it does. I was worried that this might not be the case.
Without experimenting I would not have found out. And, if I had found out that it doesn’t work I would have learned something.
It’s learning – by doing.
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. – Thomas A. Edison
That is the mindset shift you need to adapt. Create exciting experiments for the next thing you want to do. This can be everything you want, but focus on the big upside and that it is easy to do.
Pick apart your immediate actions. What experiments can you create that will give you a big learning? You might find after a while that you don’t think in tasks anymore, but in experiments. They can drive learning. Pretty fast.
Explain
The result you get from an experiment represents significant learning. It is unique to you.
By doing an experiment the learning will stick way better than just reading it in a book.
When you have finished it, sit down and write a summary of what you learned and what you will do with this information.
What did you do?
What was the result?
Would you do it different next time?
You can share what you learned with others, if you want to. You made a unique experiment, someone might also be interested in what you did and especially learned from it.
Sharing what you do is a generous act. You never know who you might have an impact on.
After finishing your experiment you should be closer to your vision.
There are two things that could be happening:
You learned something that is directly applicable to what you do, or
You learned something that raises a few more questions.
In both cases you can create a new experiment.
How are you planning to apply what you learned? What are you trying to learn from your action?
You have more questions? What kind of experiments can you create to answer those questions?
You should also check in with your vision from time to time.
It can change. A slight divergence from your path can lead to a completely different location over a long time. If you don’t catch the change in your vision you arrive somewhere that doesn’t feel like you.
Some find this to be unproductive. They say you need to pick a lofty goal that lies in the future and go for it with full intention. I see it a bit more nuanced. If I look back even half a year ago, I was a different person. Why should a different person have the exact same vision of the future?
It rarely changes dramatically. But it does change.
We need to learn
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t advocate to never sit down with a book and learn. You need to learn. It widens your horizon to what is possible.
Your vision pyramid is more vague towards the top because of it. You can’t know what you don’t know.
What I advocate for is that you need to play more. Experiment. Learn by doing. When you stumble onto new information, apply it to your life. Try it out. See it with curiosity. Don’t think: “Oh, cool new fact” and do nothing with it.
I am currently trying to get into action more. To align my doing with where I want to go. My direction is not clear, yet. Still I am writing about what I find interesting at the time.
Many don’t start because they need to know where exactly there will be in a year. You get stuck with such a thinking. You can’t predict the future. You can only control your actions. It might work, it might not. That is the reality of life. Nothing can be taken for granted.
With that being said here is the framework recap:
Envision – Know where you want to go. Create your vision of the future
Experiment – Create experiments from which you learn. They move you closer to your vision.
Explain – Write down what you learned. Explain it to yourself. (Optional) Share it with the world.
I hope you enjoyed todays letter!
Until next time.