For almost 20 years, I've indulged myself in the "too good to work hard" mentality, that was backed up by my marginal success in academic fields, but then I stumbled upon a certain claim from an anonymous source. It said something along these lines :
- Constant self-improvement is the only way to get the most out of your life.
The claim itself wasn't exactly pleasing to hear because I, rightfully so, knew that improving oneself is a hard, ambiguous and life-long commitment. As I was about to throw the idea of constant self-improvement away and continue my day without giving it further thought, I had an epiphany. At that particular moment my thought process was something like this:
- How much of a better person would I become, if I took as little as an hour from each day I spent on wasted leisure and invested it into the self-growth?
Awfully embarrassed at the fact that until that point, such an obvious thought has never crossed my mind even once (probably because at the time, I was extremely reluctant to get out of my comfort zone) and already understanding the intricacies of a phenomena called The Compound Effect, I quickly realized that the payback of such a behavior would be immense.
Over the course of the next couple of months, I (rather unsuccessfully) tried to change my inner workings in a way that they would facilitate self-improvement instead of discouraging it, but to my knowledge, it was an extremely arduous task. Why? Becuase I was a chronic procrastinator. Throughout my entire life, the demands imposed on me were rather low. My parents weren't exactly strict and I did not engage in any extracurricular activities at the time.
At first glance, having lots of free time on your hands sounds like a good thing, and it indeed is. But there is a catch, a dangerous presupposition. Having lots of free time is beneficial only if you have meaningful ways to spend it and if you don't, then your idle hands are the devil's workshop. This particular proverb describes my high school days pretty damn well. I wasn't devious or anti-social. I was just living on autopilot - the vicious cycle of attending school, playing video games and sleeping.
What is so dangerous about this kind of lifestyle is what I call large-scale procrastination. According to the dictionary, procrastination is "the action of avoiding or postponing something." However, that does not sound that threatening. Procrastination is more-less ingrained in us as a part of the "evolutionary package" everybody receives prior to birth (unless, of course, you are one of the firm tabula rasa advocators but in the light of all scientific evidence gathered in the last 200 years, the notion itself, at least to me, seems utterly ridiculous) and that's fine. It's essentially just another coping mechanism that our organism deploys when it's overworked and needs to take some edge off. Taking the edge off is a part of that statement which should be accentuated, therefore I'll highlight it in bold.
How does our organism know when is the right time to take the edge off? Through individual experience. Which means that when one lives the kind of life as I did, their "time to take the edge off" reminder will activate in their brain only at the sheer thought of doing something that takes some effort which creates a deadly feedback loop that essentially kills all of the person's willpower to accomplish anything meaningful at all. Moreover, your situation gets progressively worse when you tolerate - and therefore reinforce - such behaviour for extended periods of time. After a certain time-period, the individual himself will be utterly unable to perform any meaningful action that requires him to exert any effort into it. The dangerous part of procrastinating is not the part where you have to stay up until 4 in the morning to hand in your essay you have so flagrantly procrastinated on, it's the part where you are lying on your deathbed and you regret all the things you haven't accomplished due to your lack of motivation, discipline, failed goal prioritization or absence of any structure in the way you lived your life.
Upon realising that, I was mortified and disgusted at myself for throwing away all the time I had at my disposal when I was breezing through secondary education, and I decided to never make the same mistake ever again. That was about 10 months ago. Since then I have doubled down on my efforts and worked even harder to embed some structure and meaning into my life. Having at least partially succeeded and having realised that I am in a pretty good spot compared to me from 10 months ago, I decided that it was the right time to follow my life-long passion - writing.
On April 23rd, 2018 I created this blog with a palpable purpose in mind: to share my thoughts on how I try to get the most out of my life through constant self-improvement and to hopefully inspire others to attempt the same.
Footnotes/afterword:
- The main purpose of the blog is to provide some food for thought to anyone who stumbles upon it and is interested in its contents. I ought to avoid writing hit pieces about shallow/polarising topics that do not offer any real value to the reader and only serve as a cheap source of outrage.
- The core of the blog's contents consists of writing book reviews on - mainly - non-fiction books and, in addition to that, exploring various topics concerning productivity, psychology, philosophy and futurism.
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