How self improvement ruins your life in a good way

I remember when I discovered self-improvement I felt the world shifting, I saw the light in a world full of darkness. When you're depressed, fat and ugly.

You become a pessimist. You're angry. Salty words come out of your mouth. You start to think "I'll never be good enough" and spirals into a negative loop.

When you've realized you can be better but aren't, your subconscious cries out daily. This nagging feeling you have is your potential talking. It begs you to do better.

What's worse is self-improvement reinforces this belief even harder. You star to become aware of your flaws and insecurities that were once invisible.

This awareness can be painful, nagging, and relentless. This feeling that "Man I could be so much better" is good but sucks the most when you can't put in the work.

But all hope is not lost. We can change it around but before that you must become aware of what I'm talking about.

The monkey brain. (What it's like to be an NPC).

The human mind is a monkey. It seeks comfort over discipline. We are wired to avoid problems and pain. Think of it. We fill our days with useless activities to numb our suffering.

We'd rather waste time instead of being alone with our thoughts.

Look around you. What do you see? parties in Friday night, keyboard warriors in reddit, gossips about celebrity drama, doom scrolling etc...

Instead of confronting what makes us miserable we create excuses. It's how we work. We're humans (A monkey) . And I'm no exception.

The enemy: Seeing self-improvement as an obligation rather than a gift.

After exposure to life changing information. Going back becomes impossible. Even if you do, your mind will bully you 24/7. Your desire for more will keep you awake at night and haunt you for the rest of your life.

We are animals and the more we feed our desires the more we want. And humanities biggest desire is to "become better". It's simple but not easy.

We all want success. Any child wants success. Any adults want success. Any person wants success.

And success means becoming the person able to attain success which means personal growth (in simple words become better).

The hidden cost of personal growth.

Losing friends is scary I know but that's exactly what's going to happen. Most people waste their life because they have no meaningful goal to pursue and most people are your friends.

When you try to get better, your energy changes, your way of thinking changes and this repulses most people. Misery is addicting and everyone wants to spread their own.

They'll drag you down and don't want you to do better. (Even your family counts but not always).

Toxic friends are everywhere. They'll laugh when you tell them about self-improvement. They'll call you cringe for going to the gym and crazy for wanting to be the best.

They'll say "Lol, who do you think you are?, Some Goggin's shit?

Which is fine but you'll pay with loneliness and solitude. You'll be alone most of the time. Unless you find someone on a similar path. And who knows just how painful loneliness can be when you aren't used to it.

Plus why would you be around such people? Conversations will feel awkward, usual topics become redundant and useless. You no longer relate. When they're happy thinking what movie to watch this Saturday night, you'll be thinking how you can crush your goals.

The incompatibility happens. Your interested in getting better. Their interested in staying the same. While your busy working your ass off because you aren't happy with the life you have they'll be busy convincing you "Just enjoy life bro".

You'll create misunderstandings and conflict when you talk about your goals and ambitions in life. Which is good. You'll lose friends but not the important ones.

The other nuance of self-improvement is being willing to piss people off. No one wants to someone above them. They’ll get angry and undermine your achievements. All self-improvers go through this.

You’re happy about your results but they aren’t. (Of course there are exceptions e.g. family and true friends).

I remember how I used to laugh about monks meditating. I'd think of them as weird and useless. And boy I was wrong. The same perspective applies to most people. They cannot see the world as a whole but only in their own rusty eyes.

The good. Unexpected filters.

Self-improvement ruins your life because it kills the old you—the lazy, miserable NPC—and that death hurts like hell.

Which is both a blessing and a curse.

Self-improvement is the best shit test for men. You can see who's serious about their life and who isn't. You'll miss out on fun but one that ruins your health and gut.

I lost friends who made my life miserable. They'd laugh when I'd talk about my goal to lose 10 kg. I was called pig and boar. I hated looking at the mirror. I avoided it like the plague. But after 6 months I could go upstairs and no longer need to catch my breathe. And for the first time I no longer hated my body.

I could see my weight dropping. It wasn't easy. I had to accept the suck. I felt the fats in my arms being sticky and when I run and I'd see people laughing. Every day was internal war. I'd have excuses but I'd ditch them.

I'm no longer haunted. I no longer hate my life decisions.

I'm more alone now but I'd rather spend my time reading books than numb myself in a party I don't care about.

I'm not saying having fun is bad. But over doing it is bad. I do waste time and I'm far from perfect.

Rejecting the new and always embracing the old. This takes time and is a process. It consists of mindset shift and mental application of new paradigms.

Which is what we'll tackle next.

5 steps to mental reconstruction. Deleting the loser mindset.

The key is mindset shift. Do not look at today or tomorrow. Look at 3, 5 , 10 years from now.

Mental reconstruction is being exposed to information you haven’t known before. Which allows you to delete old beliefs but comes at the cost of not being able to relate to the masses anymore.

You become isolated until you find rare people who understand your path.

Everything starts from the mind. If your mind sucks then it's a sign that your specs are out of date. It's rusty and old.

1. Consume quality content-

We are what we are expose ourselves to. We are what we eat. And we are what we consume. There's a reason people who think of self-improvement as cringe only watch celebrity dramas and gossips.

They have trained their mind unable to think critically. Rewiring your brain starts with consumption.

Your task is to separate your own mind from the masses. This means reading books, watching quality content from quality creators and reading value articles (Like this one -totally not bragging).

Common advice but they work. The easiest way to do this is by observing people around. What do they do? Play online-games? Watch movies all night? you have to open your mind.

Entertainment isn't bad. It's necessary for recovery and I know being productive 24/7 is impossible. But wasting your day with only useless activities is bad. You need to find something that makes you tick. One that makes you feel "alive".

2. Dream Vision-

What do you want from life?

Why do you want to be disciplined and work hard in the first place?.

What's your reason?

Answer this statement and being productive becomes easy.

We are humans and we only live long if we have a reason to. Cus D'Amato the legendary trainer who made Mike Tyson from juvenile to world class boxing champion died when he knew his mission would be fulfilled.

He was fighting pneumonia and stayed strong to make sure Mike had someone that can turn him into a champ. He stayed alive because he had a reason.

Think of your parents. They want you to do better. That's why they work their 9-5 even if they hate it. Tolerance of pain due to reason is how you pursue something meaningful.

Without reason humans become docile and weak.

3. Understand self-sabotage-

The mind that bullies you is a friend that helps you but is unfiltered. It says the truth and doesn’t care about your feelings. But the problem is when it turns into self-loathing.

Self-loathing is intense dislike or hatred about ones self. Most of people have this but are unaware. They think it's laziness stopping them but in reality it's themselves hating their own accomplishments and mistakes.

They delude themselves into thinking their identity is bad. E.g. "I'm so useless I can't get anything right" , or "I'm a failure"' because Amanda said this and that.

I do not think your mind bullying you helps but being unaware of that bullying is worse. It's like an Asian parent that's unhinged and says the things needed to be said not what you want to hear.

And how do we get over that?

4. Detachment. Forgive your old self-

The amount of replies I've gotten from you people talking about hating yourself is unreal. I can see through your pain and how most of you have never realized or have been aware of self-hatred you had from your past.

We need self-love. I know it's cringe but you probably don't even know what that means. If you can't love yourself who will?

Negative self talk, sensitivity to criticism, past wounds and fear of rejection. Are common traits of self-hatred. The misery you feel is comforting but will only hold you back.

Forgiving my old self wasn't easy. I had to burn bridges and never look back.

I had to accept all my insecurities. I had to face my fat face everyday in the mirror. I had to accept looks I get from people when I go out. I had to accept the suck of not fitting in a chair properly.

I never even saw my abs for my whole life until I lost some weight. Even then it was only the shape and not the muscles.

But the thing that shocked me the most is no one cared. No one remembered how I slip from the stairs because I couldn't walk properly.

No one remembered that embarrassing story I was trying to keep a secret.

The past rarely matters unless you messed up big time. Even so you can recover and make ends meet.

Forgive your cringe actions, forgive the problems you made and forgive your old immature self.

That's how you form a new identity able to get rid of the loser mindset that's holding you back.

5. Be delusional about your potential-

You must have belief that you can do this even if everyone thinks you're dumb and stupid. There's nothing wrong with believing in yourself. People will hold you back and it's your job to detach.

You must own the suck and do the work even if it feels hard. I told myself no matter what I'd lose weight. My friends laughed at me. But I kept going.

2 years later a friend saw me and told me how much of a massive change I've made. I even forgot about it.

You must be confident in achieving your goals. Even if the odds are 1 in a million you must become arrogant and say I can do this. The stronger the belief the stronger the potential.

Because deep down you already know how miserable it is to live like an NPC- broke, lazy, depressed and average.

Thinking big is delusional but destroys your limits. And to become better you must always surpass limitations. Struggle is part of the process ups and downs are inevitable.

But stay delusional. Self-improvement is a double edged sword. Use it for ruin or improvement is up to you.

If I gave up I wouldn't be where I am today. It took time but worth every struggle I had to pay for.

Thanks for reading and see you next week.

Much love,

-Noat (Author of Improvement Letters)

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