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The first, but not least, article in the Betterment series out of three. Think back on all those videos, tutorials, lifehacker articles, even books that you consumed over the years. We love to consume them alright — they make us feel like we’re doing something, but can you look at your browser history and count the number of such articles in the past year that you really acted upon and somehow made your life better as a result? If the answer is “none” or even “some” then this article might be for you.

I learned this the hard way

In college, I was obsessed with betterment. It was an odd time in my life which can unironically be called “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” I was addicted to self-help content without actually helping myself. It felt very much like a yo-yo, although I wish I’d realized this much sooner. The steps were:

1. Be in a semi-stable state of slobness with an increasingly strong looming feeling that I’m not living up to my potential — the yo-yo is slowly slipping down.
2. Hit some kind of bottom, like realizing I gained a lot of weight or failed an exam or became really sick after too much drinking at a party — the yo-yo is ALL the way on the floor now.
3. Become super motivated to get my shit together and jump into lots of ambitious endeavors e.g. learning a new computer language, restart reading The Dune for the Nth time, get into a full re-write of my class notes, etc — the yo-yo is lurching up erratically. You see where this is going.
4. This momentum lasts a few days, maybe a week, until I get distracted, other things get in the way, and I go back to being a procrastinating, non-caring slob. — the yo-yo is limp at a relatively stable height now.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 every few months or so without ever getting anywhere.

After a few years out of college in the workforce, I matured a little bit and realized how extremely unprodictive this crazy behavior was. It could have almost been better not torturing myself with any of it and instead to unashamedly live a slobby debauchery of a life. However, perhaps I wouldn’t have learned this lesson I’m about to get into.

A concrete example: approaching a book

Let’s say you set off to read a book and after a few weeks of on-and-off reading, you finally complete it. If someone were to ask you about it, here’s what you might say about the experience if you were being truly honest:

I finished reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman and thought it was mildly interesting. My friends wouldn’t stop talking about it, so I read it to see what all the fuss was about. I guess it will make me a better person and help me make better life decisions, but more importantly, when I shared a picture of the book with a quote from it on Instagram, I got lots of likes and that felt GOOD.

Nobody would actually say that, but do you see what I’m getting at?

The first problem with that statement is that your motivation is rooted in social acceptance

There’s nothing wrong with reading books that your like-minded friends recommend — hell, I do this a lot — or even discussing it later to test your understanding, but the primary motivation needs to come from within and preferably be something concrete. Telling other people about the book can be a subtle way of bragging that gives you undeserved satisfaction and tricks your brain into considering it a done deal, making you lose interest in actually thinking deeper about the knowledge or putting it into practice. It’s the same reason that people post black squares on instagram in support of Black Lives Matter — it makes them feel like good people when in reality it does little to help in the fight against racism.

The second problem is that your goal of becoming a “good person” is too vague or The Goal Hierarchy

There are many layers to being a “good person” and at the very bottom layer we might have extremely precise and often mundane actions, like “doing the dishes” or “vacuuming.” One level above these two, we might have “keeping your house in order,” and separately, “being nice to your partner.” At the very top of this particular hierarchy, perhaps on level 5 or 6, you could then have “Being a good person.” Then problem is, you need to fulfill all of those bottom layers before you get even close to being a good person. You have to define what those middle and bottom requirements are for you personally, and you have to be intent on executing them.

In the example of reading a book, instead of vaguely deciding that you’ll be a “better person” from the knowledge you gained, you need something more specific and actionable, like “I used to do X badly but using what I learned from this book I will take it upon myself to do X better tomorrow,” or even “I will write an article about what I learned in this book to test my understanding and to summarize it for my readers.” As a rule of thumb, if it can be translated directly to an action, then it has a good chance of being at the right level of abstraction.

Let’s now rewrite our book motivation statement

I decided to read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman because I found myself struggling with some cognitive biases and want to learn how to make more objective, rational and informed decisions. After reading it, I committed to applying the mental techniques therein at least 3 times in the next month and describing these experiences in my diary. Only then will I allow myself to post on social media about it.

Note that we’re setting a specific personal goal before getting into the book. This primes us for better absorbing that knowledge while reading it. We’re also defining specific follow-up actions, which improves retention and allows us to actually gain a tangible benefit from the act of reading. We are mindful about avoiding any undeserved satisfaction from reading it, thus preventing sabotaging our learning process.

Now, let’s step back and go back to the question we asked at the beginning: what can we do to maximize the value we extract for all the content we consume?

The key to maintaining focus is purpose

What you need is purpose. A goal. A destination. The actual destination doesn’t matter so much. The presence of a goal that truly feels important to you is what’s crucial. It gives you a reason to turn the knowledge you gain into action, creating good habits and making incremental progress. You need a concrete ultimate goal to drive you, like an invisible fire within you that hunngers for knowledge, money, or whatever it may be. Make it as impossible or ridiculous as you want, but you need one. Without it, we are like mushy overripe avocados.

Really? Sounds kind of hand-wavey to me

Our pre-historic brain has evolved to thrive when our own survival is at stake. Imagine it’s 10,000 BC and your family will starve if you don’t find food in the next few days. You better believe that your brain will work in overdrive to come up with the cleverest, most effective way to trap one of those skittish antelopes.

The difference in the mindset is huge. If you jump into a book with the intention of accomplishing a goal that’s so important that it feels like it’s crucial for your survival, you will not only remember it better, but also be better positioned to convert that knowledge into a benefit.

I’m not saying that you should put yourself in danger, but a healthy amount of urgency does wonders to how productive and retentive our brains are. If the book you’re trying to read feels important and is properly aligned with your goal hierarchy then you don’t have to worry about procrastinating on reading it, or quickly forgetting its contents shortly after you read it. In fact, you shouldn’t be able to put the freaking book down because you are so captivated by it.

What if you don’t have a goal that drives you?

Now, finding a goal that drives you, or more broadly meaning, deserves an article in itself, but you can start by asking yourself some honest questions:

• Where do I want to be in 5 years? In 10 years?
• What is the ideal person that I want to become and what do I need to get there?
• What am I (or people close to me) doing that’s slowing down my progress to achieve the above?

Answering these questions earnestly should help you get started. If it doesn’t feel right after a while, don’t give up and keep correcting course. In fact, you might be correcting course your whole life because meaning can be a moving a target, but as long as you’re improving every time, then you will feel fulfilled. As the cliché goes, “It is the journey, not the destination, that matters.” If you just lie around on a beach for weeks on end sipping margaritas, you will not only get bored, but you will find look for challenges, like arguing with your partner. However, didn’t it feel good when you planned the trip and looked forward to it during your last few days of work before the flight, and how excited you felt? That’s because our brains are happy when we go from a worse place to a better place. If you’re standing still, be it a bad place or good, you will not feel fulfilled.

Now, pragmatic people will say that this is not enough and that you need to invest time into meta-learning or meditate or what have you, and those are definitely important, but my point remains that if you simply don’t care enough, you will not approach them with enough seriousness or dedication for them to make a difference either. When there’s a will, there’s a way, so if your motivations are clear and you want to move faster, you will be compelled to look for those improvements when the time comes, all of it snowballing into a holistic positive feedback loop that moves you closer and closer to your ultimate goal.

Let’s now rivisit our book reading motivational statement

How does reading this book fit into your bigger goal hierarchy? Let’s say that my ultimate goal is to earn a Nobel Prize. A sub-goal of that could be to sharpen my analytical skills and sub-goal of that could be to read 10 books about thinking. This now lets us connect the dots and the goal we set for this book to learn about cognitive biases nicely fits into our overall goal hierarchy.

It’s imperative that we don’t jump directly from “I want to win a Nobel Prize” to “thus, I should read this book.” We need to break it down into more logical layers for the hierarchy to truly align with what we want. When we do that, we might discover that there actually isn’t a path from my ultimate goal to this sub-goal, meaning that either we didn’t formulate our goals correctly or that the real reason we wanted to read the book was simply to impress our peers. Because earning a Nobel Prize is so important to me, my mindset adjusts to take this sub-sub-sub-task of reading this book much more seriously, and setting concrete follow-up actions not only reinforces my understanding but allows me to reap concrete benefits that serve my ultimate goal down the line.

That seems like a lot of work. Can’t I just read a book for the sake of it?

Absolutely, as long as you’re intentional about it. Not everything has to have some ultimate goal or provide a specific tangible benefit to you. In fact, it’s important for our mental health to do things just for the sake of doing them. Taking a walk on the beach, relaxing by playing some video games while enjoying a beer, re-reading the Harry Potter saga for the 5th time. None of these actions would be considered “productive” but that doesn’t mean you should feel guilty doing them if they make you happy.

Of course, moderation is key and you should realize when you’re just practicing escapism, but what this article is really about is not lying to yourself. It’s about listening to the little voice in your head that says “should I really be doing this?” and being able to say “yes, absolutely.”

In parting

If the title of this article didn’t make sense at first, I hope that it does now. It is but the tip of the iceberg in how we can transform our aimless pursuits of self-improvement into aimful ones.

In my next article, The Dopamine Economy, we dive into a deeper analysis of how our dopamine circuits affect our productivity and well-being.

12/23/2018: initial version

12/19/2020: re-wrote initial incoherent rambling into a read-worthy article