A simple self-improvement formula
🔥Plus: Knowing vs growing, a Matthew Perry farewell, and James Clear wisdom
Welcome to the 168th consecutive edition of the newsletter.
Here are this week’s five insights about self-improvement.
Enjoy.
1/ Wise words…
Tucked away on page 16 of Atomic Habits is this insight…
As James explains, “The same way that money multiples through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.”
“And the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous.”
The sooner you recognize that habits compound, the sooner you will begin to realize what you do everyday will have profound implications over time.
Takeaway → Habits behave like interest. They will compound daily.
2/ Be fixable…
The Japanese have a practice called Kintsugi, which is the art of repairing broken pottery.
When a piece of pottery breaks, a gold lacquer is used to reattach the pieces and highlight the breakage.
This is a lovely self-improvement metaphor.
In an ideal world we would be unbreakable. But that is not the world we live in.
We will break — many times — over the course of our life.
Being able to put ourselves back together while highlighting our scars should be the standard we hold ourselves to.
3/ A formula for self-improvement…
Self-improvement is a nebulous topic. But I think it can be boiled down to a simple formula.
Self-Improvement = Essential Habits x Frequency x DurationHere’s a quick breakdown...
Essential habits → The vital few that will deliver the bulk of the success you seek.
Frequency → How often you will perform your essential habits.
Duration → How long you will perform your essential habits.
Here is a quick example of what that might look like in the area of weight loss.
Essential habit → Logging my food in MyFitnessPal.
Frequency → Daily
Duration → For the rest of my life
A few points worth noting here.
I have found logging my meals to be one of the most valuable things I have done to successfully lose weight and keep it off.
I am biased, but it has been my experience that daily habits are exponentially more powerful than intermittent habits.
and every habit I adopt is always with the intent to do it for the remainder of my life.
Note → This simple formula becomes exponentially explosive when you start bundling habits together in the various arenas of life you are looking to transform.
4/ Knowing vs growing…
People love to flex on social media by sharing how many books they have read in 2023.
To which I responded (to myself) with this lovely quote…
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying reading is a bad thing.
But if we are not turning the things we learn into something useful, then it’s just useless trivia.
Self-improvement is about finding ways to turn what we know into something that will help us grow.
And that growth should be something we can document.
Mindset to steal → It’s not how much you know. It’s how much you grow.
5/ The late Matthew Perry.Friends is, hands down, my favourite TV show of all time.
With the sudden passing of Matthew Perry, I have been watching interviews he gave for the memoir he published last year.
While on The View, he shared this wonderful parable that Actor Martin Sheen shared with him.
It’s about our scars — physical, financial, psychological — and a new way to think about them.
It’s only 23 seconds long.
The message ties in nicely with the Japanese practice of Kintsugi that I mentioned above.
That you for sharing Matthew. You will be missed.
That’s it for today. 🙏 Thanks for reading.
Keep being awesome my friend.
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