What will you be like in 10 years? Or me? Or the society? In this particular case, 10 years is just a pointless figure that I used so I can establish a common frame of reference (by adding a concrete value to that sentence) with anyone who might be reading this article. The main point of this article would be congruent with any value I put in there because it simply does not matter how long is the timespan is, what matters is what is supposed to happen when the time is up.
Through the evolutionary processes, people attained the ability to look into the future. As far as modern science is concerned, only humans have the cognitive capability to envision, predict and plan for the future. This extraordinary ability comes with a huge merit (you can avoid many potentially dangerous situations hence you can enhance your quality of life) but also a substantial demerit (you come to a harsh realization that one day your time will run out). Some people assume that you get to, in fact, live forever, and some people just accept the reality as it is and try to make the most of it (for the point I'm trying to get across, it's not exactly relevant whether the first assumption is true or not).
Regardless of whether one believes that his time eventually runs out or not, he adheres to it and takes it into account in just about every aspect of his life. As people get older, most of them obtain the need to plan out their life to a various degree. Everyone knows that planning is important because you reduce the amount of chaos creeping at you in the shadows, waiting to come out as you make a mistake. That's not quite right. It's more like you grab a torch to see what is ready to jump right at you as you make that mistake, and if you are skilful (lucky) enough, you can avoid it. Sometimes when one decides to grab the torch to take a closer look at all the mayhem happening around him, he afterwards often wishes to be able to turn back into the oblivious man he was before he took a peek but it's already too late. In my mind, this analogy is the main reason why people usually don't like to look hard into their future - because future can look bright, but future can also look frightening and inescapable (which is not a good combination).
Despite all of that I do think that facing hardships of tomorrow is a much more advantageous strategy than staying oblivious to them. It's not always easy, but I firmly believe that thinking ahead and planning in accordance with your vision of the future is the most optimal strategy to get the most out of your presumably limited amount of time. What struck me as ironic is that, in the context of the modern society, the importance of rigorous planning ahead somewhat fell off the wagon. It's undeniable that in first world countries life is much easier than it has ever been. It the past people often needed to vigilantly plan ahead in order to stay clear of many dangers that were creeping on them. Nowadays the majority of people barely need to make an effort to get by in life just fine. As a result, lots of people choose the convenient path of least resistance, and they decide to just get by. Grandiose plans and visions are only for the handful of visionaries (lunatics) that are determined enough to dedicate their entire life to the cause they believe in. It's true that such aspirations are not for everyone but in the light of all the technological advancements of the past 200 years, it comes to me as utterly puzzling as to why so many people don't strive to become the best version of themselves and make the world a better place.
So, after this lengthy preface, I give you the main reason for writing this article - to briefly unravel The Summer Self-improvement Plan I've devised for myself in order to make the first step on the route to becoming the best version of myself (technically it's the second step right after putting my life in order and engraining some routine into it, but that can be classified as step zero). It may sound a little over the top or grandiose the way I described it, but it basically boils down to accomplishing these goals:
Regular activities (~18hrs a day)
- Sleeping (~7hrs): Humans need to get enough sleep to function properly, nothing to do there. Cannot trim some time off it because the next day I'll have the cognitive prowess of a cockroach.
- Reading (~2,5hrs): I've already decided on the list of the books I plan to read this summer and according to my estimations, I'll read them all in time when I read about 50 pages each day on average which is not as a difficult task.
- Taking notes from the books (1,5hrs): For me personally, skimming through the book after I am finished with it and writing extensive notes from it is the way to go. I read mostly non-fiction books, so I want to retain as much information as possible. Otherwise, I would consider my reading sessions not as valuable as I do at the moment. This process can get a little lengthy at times, and in addition to that, I also accounted for the notes I'll be taking from interesting psychology studies I come across, so I reserved about 90 minutes per day for it.
- Writing blog posts (1hr): It takes about 2-3 hours to think up, write and polish an average post (weekly updates are usually done within an hour), and I want to write 2-3 posts each week so 1 hour a day seems like a reasonably long estimation.
- Exercising/meditation (1hr): Not much to say about this one. Upon finishing Spark by J.J. Ratey, I started to exercise in a much more serious manner to make up for all the hours I spend in front of the computer screen or a book.
- English and Japanese practice (1hr): Mostly working on grammar and vocabulary.
- Meaningful leisure (2.5hrs): Reading novels, watching anime, socialising with friends (yes, in spite of the vibe people get from me, I enjoy it quite a bit).
- Procrastination and utility (2hrs): Unfortunately, it's only inevitable that humans will procrastinate. The biological and cultural conditioning for it is strongly wired within us. What you one can do is simply cut your losses and account for a fair amount of procrastination. Also to look like a human being, one needs to take care of oneself on a biological level, and that's at least an hour each day right there.
When I account for all the regular activities, I am left with about 6 hours a day (~670 hours in total throughout entire summer) to invest in my other "auxiliary" projects.
Irregular activities (650hrs in total)
- Finish the self-authoring programme by Jordan B. Peterson (15 hrs)
- Listening to audiobooks (35 hrs)
- Healthy lifestyle research (20 hrs)
- Work experience; coaching, clinical psychology and business related work (2x40 hrs + 25 hrs)
- Research of potential universities for my master's programme (50 hrs)
- Bachelor thesis research (25 hrs)
- Looking into the problematics of psychometrics (25 hrs)
- Writing a novel + research (150 hrs)
- Revamping my extremely rusty knowledge of high school maths (50hrs)
- Put my knowledge of psychology and statistics in order(50 hrs + 25 hrs)
- Messing around with life philosophy (50hrs)
- Trip to the mountains with my lads (50hrs)
As you can see, apart from reading 350 pages a week, writing blog articles, taking notes from the books I read or interesting studies I come across as well as other activities I already did before the start of my project (ones that are not underlined), I didn't exactly set a lot of these activities. I simply appointed a time frame for every project/activity I want to have a look at during this summer. The time tags on the projects themselves are only orientational.
To conclude this article I will just say this: Striving to become the best version of yourself is a neverending battle between the rational part of your brain on one side and the animalistic part of your brain and social/cultural conditioning on the other side. Even though it's true that a lot of the times people can motivate us to accomplish more, but a lot of the times society is one big vortex that is dragging everyone as close to being average across all of life's domains as possible. Also, people usually lack the incentive to work hard when almost nobody in their surroundings possesses the "work hard" mentality. It takes a great deal of inner strength to overcome the initial barrier of laziness and doubt to start progressively working towards something you desire to accomplish.
Cheers
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