“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.” — James Clear, Atomic Habits
I’m very skeptical of self-help and the self-improvement space these days. I’ve simply been inundated with way too much of it, and a lot of it blends together. So when I had to drive 16 hours with my fiancee on vacation, why did I choose to buy James Clear’s Atomic Habits, the number one best-selling book on Amazon in 2021?
Part of the reason is that it was popular. I wanted to understand where the appeal was even if I’m disillusioned with self-improvement. The self-help appeal has mass appeal for the same reasons it used to appeal to me — everyone wants to better themselves. Everyone wants to achieve more and be more successful, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
I didn’t want to like the book, but I did
Three hours into the book, I was hooked. If I could boil the premise of the whole book down in one paragraph, it’s this.
Small changes and small habits you perform now have downstream effects later. Every choice you make is a vote for the person you want to be in the future. These small decisions don’t seem like they’ll matter much in the immediate future, but they help you improve by 1% each day. Small habits coupled over a long period of time, they can make big changes. You don’t improve yourself through an endless amount of willpower, discipline, and motivation — you develop systems and routines that will gradually transform your life instead of rapidly changing your life.
Despite being an inherent contrarian and skeptic, halfway through the book, I was like “hell yeah, James Clear! I’m about to make a lot of small changes in my life that are going to have huge effects down the line.” The big appeal of Atomic Habits to a skeptic like me is it doesn’t overpromise. It doesn’t say drinking a lot of water is instantly going to make you a Fortune 500 CEO or to follow the Pomodoro Technique to transform your life.
No — Atomic Habits is a book that’s about accessible and small changes that allow gradual growth. It’s shockingly realistic and down to Earth for a field that constantly overpromises, which I noticed as someone who’s read a lot of self-improvement in the online space.
Plus, I found the implication that every decision you make matters being very empowering. The message that every decision you make is a vote for who you want to be is empowering. We stopped at my future brother-in-law’s house, and at night, after we were finished spending time with his family and about to go to bed, I saw myself analyzing every decision I made and the decision’s implications for my future self.
Simple decisions we make every day like deciding whether to watch Netflix or read a book, whether to play video games or write, whether to exercise early in the morning or sleep in.
I completely drank the kool-aid of Atomic Habits. For a day, every decision I made was devoted to my future self and the person I wanted to be. I started analyzing what I ate, how I spent my money, how I dressed and thought about my future self down the line.
But at the end of the day, I was exhausted. Since I thought about every micro-choice I made in the day for the end goal of improving my future self, I felt like I wasn’t giving myself the room to breathe. I felt like I was pushing myself way too much and not giving myself time to relax, time to set boundaries, and time to devote to my relationships and take a pause on the whole self-improvement journey.
And so I stopped. It’s not like I don’t want to improve my habits, that I don’t want to devote more time to reading, become a better cook, and clean better around the house.
But it still felt like I was forcing it when I wasn’t ready, that I was constantly in a state of rejecting who I currently am and telling myself I wasn’t good enough compared to the person I want to be in the future.
You also need to zoom out and live your life
Contrary to what people might think, I don’t think self-improvement is an inherently good or bad thing. I think it depends on how you internalize it, and how you apply it. Some people take it too far at the expense of their relationships. Some people reject objectively good advice that will improve their lives.
Self-help has been around literally forever, and there will always be a market and demand for material helping people better themselves in accessible ways.
I’m the kind of person that goes too hard, tries too hard, and has it completely backfires on me when I do. I became the best runner I could have been when I tried less hard and slowed myself down in the process. I’ve always become more successful when I’ve prioritized rest and relationships, and taken a step back.
While I am very critical of my daily habits and decisions, I am a pretty accomplished person at the moment. I just got a big promotion at work, am about to enter evening law school, just finished my master’s degree with high marks, and have made a little something of myself as a writer who just writes for fun on the side, being able to make four-digit figures a month.
Clearly, I have a lot to juggle and just being able to get through it would be a big accomplishment. I realize I underestimate my emotional maturity and self-awareness in being able to recognize I’m always exactly where I’m supposed to be. Every time I mindlessly spend hours watching Netflix or playing video games, it’s me giving myself a signal that I need a break. Sometimes, mindlessly doomscrolling on social media helps me feel zoom out and feel connected to what’s going on in the world. Being a runner has taught me the art of restraint and the art of taking a step back, being smart enough to already have these tools and see the big picture.
As I listened to more of the Atomic Habits audiobook, my favorite chapter was the last one, The Downside of Creating Good Habits. This was a chapter about the danger of clinging too hard to an identity about yourself, and the dangers of just focusing on endless self-improvement and our daily habits. It was essentially saying my approach of hyper-focusing on every little choice I made was wrong.
We also need to zoom out. We need to live our lives. We need to allow ourselves to be human. We need breaks.
Taking a self-improvement journey too seriously doesn’t allow for those things.
For now, I’m done with self-improvement
Again, what someone thinks about self-improvement is more about them than it is about the field and the space. Self-help will always be around and people will always want it, especially if they’re in a place of despair and willing to try anything to get better.
Three years ago, I was in that mind space. That’s why I wanted to make as many adjustments as possible.
But now, I don’t think I need self-improvement anymore. I think I just need to listen to myself, listen to my body and mind, and continue to affirm I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
How I self-improve personally is trusting I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. How I optimize my potential is by trusting my gut and instincts and leaning into those instincts of when to push harder and when to step back.
It’s a very difficult thought process to explain, but I have a system I learned from running to not make any sudden changes or surges to the way I live my life. In a marathon, pacing yourself to run at a slightly underwhelming or appropriate pace for a long period of time is the path to success. I know what I need right now to not burn out and not grow disillusioned down the line.
Radical self-acceptance and working on always being proud of where I am is the approach that works for me, and it’s worked really well the past couple of years, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
Different things work for different people, but I think one pitfall we fall into when we read self-improvement material is we think we don’t know ourselves. It’s thinking we don’t know what works for us, because growth and success look different for every person. James Clear wrote a great book with great advice, but he doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know every nuance of your personal journey, traumas, or struggles.
That’s why, at the end of the day, you need to reflect on yourself, what you want, and your own life. That’s how you improve most and optimize yourself, or just accept yourself for who you are and do your best every day. The latter will always be the most sustainable approach.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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