The Case Against Self-Improvement

Introduction

Hello Wonderful Readers,

One year ago, I became an author. As I tucked into a giant half-baked cookie pan and vanilla ice cream to celebrate (thank you to the charming man who ordered it for me), I reflected on my failures and learnings this last year. Today, I want to share those with you.

This year, my attitude towards living a creative life has changed completely. Since I started believing that self-improvement is a farce, I quickly put aside all my excuses to “merely do the work” (Seth Godin), and I found myself with a complete first draft of my second novel. This perspective will take a little longer to explain than a 2,200-character Instagram caption, but I believe that you deserve something comprehensive on this topic. So, I hope that what I have learned is helpful for you, for brand-new baby creatives and aspiring authors alike.

Here goes nothing.

* You must keep going. 

After I held my first book baby in my hands, I expected to feel happy. Instead, I felt depressed for a long time afterward. I had spent 14 years, about half my life, as “an aspiring author.” Now that I was simply “an author,” that identity shift completely overwhelmed me. I felt like I was facing the death of all my former selves who had made my book happen. In fact, years ago, I had accepted the very real possibility that I might never publish my book at all. Now, I was bewildered. Did I have it in me to sit down at my desk again? What else did I possibly have to say?

After you accomplish anything major in life or go through any major change, things will take time to reorient themselves to a new normal. You will have to become a new person with new goals. How do you do that? My writing teacher, Ann Randolph, shared a story from Steven Pressfield, which I’ll paraphrase poorly:

Steven Pressfield spent ages working on a draft of a book. When he submitted it to his editor, he expected to sit on his hands. But as soon as the editor received it, they said to him, “Great. Now go start the next one.”

Put simply, you must keep going. Sometimes, it’s the only thing you can do. Once you’re past the craziness of the launch, the screening, or the wedding, the next steps of life remain. Starting another project might feel cruel at first, but please don’t sit around.

After I floated for a couple of months, slowly, I got my butt in the chair, and I started writing again.

* Be very attuned to which projects you want to do.

 “You have this natural want. That want is the thing that moves evolution. Like a plant, it's like, "Oh, there's sun. I want to move in that direction." It’s the thing that allows us to know that's our evolutionary path…And they kind of show where the growth is occurring or wants to occur." – Joe Hudson on Lenny’s Podcast.

I had an idea for a second novel about three years ago. I wrote a small bit of it in 2022, but then I stopped. I was worried. Do people even read novels anymore? I should be writing SEO-optimized articles, I thought to myself, if I really wanted to be a successful writer. This preoccupation with what I “should” be doing left me stagnated, flailing, and ultimately stuck.

Then, at some point a couple of months ago, I basically decided: f**k it. I didn’t care whether or not anyone would read my second book. I wanted to write that story for myself! And write that book, I would. Once I made that decision, everything changed. Suddenly, I felt inspired by the world around me again. As I wrote my second book, new ideas for other projects and pieces came to me constantly. Energetically and creatively, it was like night and day.

I can’t overstate the importance of this: as much as you can, when you have an idea for a project that you really want to do, do it. Run towards it and embrace it. Get started. Somewhere. Anywhere. The energy that you get from doing the one project you really want to do will solve everything.

If you find yourself thinking, "I should do XYZ project or activity," stop for a second. Notice how it feels in your body. Do you feel heavy? Do you feel guilty? Do you feel stuck? Now, imagine doing something you want to do. Do you feel lighter? Do you feel curious? Do you feel excited? Try to do things you want to do more often.

* Make up a deadline. Create a friendly routine.

“Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time.” – Rick Rubin, “The Creative Act: A Way of Being.”

I had a very unproductive summer. But then, in September, I went to a writing workshop with the London Writers’ Salon to mark the start of the “100-Days Challenge.” This workshop was an initiation. There were 100 days left in the year. F**k! I thought to myself. 2024 was almost over, and I had little to nothing to show for it. It felt like it was now or never.

I sat down and started writing 3,000 words per day on my second novel. Surprisingly, I could hit my word count in 2-3 hours. Once I was in flow, I noticed that I felt energized; I found joy in writing the scenes and figuring out the plot points. Perhaps, like the birth of a second child, the book just slid right out of me. I finished the first draft just last week, about a month into the 100-Days Challenge.

My original deadline for the first draft of the novel had been September 1st. That came and went. Then, I started working towards the 100-Days Challenge, and I blew it out of the water. In general, I hate being told what to do. But once I found a simple structure that I could stick to every day and tick off once I’d completed it, it was ironically freeing.

So, to get your project done, set yourself a deadline. Yes, it will be totally arbitrary. If you pass that deadline for whatever reason, that’s okay, just set another one. Once you've chosen that goal, try to work backward and set up a daily practice, so you make a bit of progress each day. As Rick Rubin says,

“Find the sustainable rituals that best support your work. If you set a routine that is oppressive, you’ll likely find excuses to not show up. It’s in the interest of your art to create an easily achievable schedule to start with. If you commit to working for half a day, something good can happen that generates momentum."

* Compete with yourself.

“…the only person you’re ever competing against is yourself. The rest is out of your control.” – Rick Rubin, quoting John Wooden in “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”

To write my second book, I set myself a target of 3,000 words per day. Why 3,000 words per day? Because on my semi-productive days over the summer, I could comfortably write about 2,200 words per day. So, 3,000 was a tiny bit of a stretch for me. Could I write that much? The challenge seemed exciting but achievable. Plus, I had a funny feeling that once I sat down to tackle a scene, reaching a 3,000-word goal would be easy. I was right. Within a couple of weeks, I finished the first draft of my second book, about a year after I published my first.

Once you start competing with yourself, you will enter a completely different league. That momentum will be insatiable. The psychologist Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson encourages us to ask ourselves: "Am I performing better than I did in the past? Am I learning? Am I getting better?" "Am I smarter than I was a week ago, a month ago, a year ago because I’ve been taking the time to learn?"

So, if you challenge yourself to a duel, you'll soon be surprised at just how far you have come.

* ⁠Enjoyment is everything.

I love my mother, but she has a particularly draconian perspective on life. When she was working on her PhD thesis, I encouraged her to celebrate after she finished each chapter. Instead, she insisted that she could only celebrate once the whole thing was finished. Did she celebrate when she finally defended the thing? Nope. Not hardly at all.

I believe that hard work matters, but I also believe that enjoying what you do and celebrating wins along the way are equally important. Enjoying your work is a good thing because it increases your chances of success. When you're happy, you're more likely to stay motivated, and you'll actually get better work done.

In the few years that I've been building my writing career, I have wanted to fire myself as my marketer many times. But half of being bad at marketing means that I’ve also had to accept where I am on my journey. Accepting myself and finding ways to enjoy marketing my content has given me more stamina. If I’m too mean to myself, my self-criticism just weighs me down and stops me in my tracks. But when I can find a way to enjoy editing TikToks using iMovie on my computer because it’s fun, then I get more TikToks edited and published out there in the world.

In fact, Joe Hudson shares on Lenny’s Podcast that enjoyment is about internal work, not external work. He suggests that we should ask ourselves:

“How can I enjoy this 10% more right now? So, it’s not about changing anything in the external world…Trying is not what creates more enjoyment. It’s usually letting go of trying that creates more enjoyment.”

So, pick any task that you hate doing, any meeting with your team that you find completely pointless, or any assignment you’ve been dreading and ask yourself: How can I enjoy this 10% more?

* You will have to learn the simplest things last.

“I have had to learn the simplest things / last. Which made for difficulties” – “Maximus, to himself" by Charles Olsen

I did not reach my goal of selling 10,000 copies of my book in the first year. I tried Amazon ads and did not waste that much money, but I also got no sales. I am currently running the A/B test on potential book covers that I should have run almost a year ago. Thank God for print-on-demand! Lol. Hopefully, by the time you’re reading this, I’ll have a better cover for my book that fits my genre.

The reality of building a creative career is that even more than 2 years in, I still have so much to learn and so much I am yet to master. I perpetually exist in this liminal state of half-baked imperfections. But then I remember the wisdom from the poem, “Maximus, to himself,”

“We are all late / in a slow time.”

“We grow up many / And the single / is not easily / known.”

Growth doesn’t happen overnight. You may feel like the same person you were when you woke up yesterday. But when you look back in a year or two, you will be amazed by how much you have changed! So please, don’t kick yourself because you spent a year learning something that now takes you only an hour to complete. You are doing something right. It is better to learn late than never to have learned at all.

* You must decide to go pro.

“All you have to do [to turn pro] is change your mind.” – Steven Pressfield, “Turning Pro”

A couple of months ago, I was somewhere between posting on TikTok, writing, and balancing client work when a sobering idea crept into my mind:

If I want to be a professional writer, I need to write a lot more than I am currently writing.

Anyone can write 50,000 words, 100,000 words, or even one book. But two books? Or even three books? If I wanted to accomplish that, I would need to reach a whole other level of dedication. It was a switch, a simple decision.

Luckily, this realization coincided with the 100-Days Challenge. It was the same familiar world of writing characters, scenes, and plots, but it still felt like the land of the unknown. In my mind, the publication of my first book had been a lofty fluke. Yes, I now know how to self-publish a book. But here I was, crossing the chasm into second-book territory.

In “Turning Pro,” Steven Pressfield describes this inflection point. He says,

“The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits…A professional has professional habits…We plan our activities in order to accomplish an aim…This changes our days completely. It changes what time we get up and it changes what time we go to bed …When we were amateurs, our life was about drama, about denial, and about distraction…But we are not amateurs anymore. We are different, and everyone in our lives sees it.”

Deciding to turn pro is second book energy, second film energy, and second creative costume project energy. One day, you’re going to have to sit down and cross that chasm. And it’s not something you just do once. As Pressfield says, turning pro is like “kicking a drug habit or stopping drinking. It’s a decision, a decision to which we must re-commit every day.”

* Combat your excuses one by one.

“Friends sometimes ask, “Do you get lonely sitting by yourself all day?” At first, it seemed off to hear myself answer No. Then I realized I was not alone; I was in the book; I was with the characters. I was with my Self.” – Steven Pressfield, “The War of Art”

This year, I spent many months flailing between projects and fluffing around. My narrative for my life went like this,

I live alone. I write alone. I work alone. I’m single. It’s too much alone time. I can’t write unless I get a roommate or a cat.

Right? Wrong! I was parroting a couple of the classic excuses that Rick Rubin mentions,

“Thoughts and habits that are not conducive to work:”

* “Thinking you can only do your best work in certain conditions.”

* “Believing a certain mood or state is necessary to do your best work.”

* Thinking anything that’s out of your control is in your way.”

But when I sat down to write for the 100-Days Challenge, something magical happened. I was so focused on the words and the story that I didn’t feel alone anymore. I realized that while I’m writing, my mind is super stimulated. I’m so in flow that my need for other people doesn't seem as intense. I soon combined this with a daily gratitude practice recommended by Joe Hudson. For 7.5 minutes a day, I talk to myself out loud about all the things I’m grateful for, and I feel the gratitude in my body. I started to say out loud to myself:

I am so lucky to have a small, beautiful, one-bedroom apartment that I love, where I can sit in my house all day and write if I want to.

So, it’s up to you to embrace your current living configuration. You can get a lot done the way your life is set out right now, trust me. Things could always be worse. You could have less help. You could be older and less capable for all kinds of reasons. So, focus more on what you do have. Define yourself as someone who has rather than someone who has not. And you’ll be amazed at all the reasons you can come up with to create rather than all the excuses as to why you can’t.

Conclusion: Focus on the next step of your natural evolution.  

“Start close in, don't take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in” – David Whyte, “Start Close In”

Writing my second book has taught me many things. But the most important thing I have learned is that believing we have to improve ourselves is heavy and draws us into a scarcity mindset. When I beat myself up for not doing what I "should" be doing, like posting on social media to share my work more, it reinforces the idea that I am lacking in my current state and that I have to gain or achieve something external in order to be acceptable, lovable and worthy. This way of seeing ourselves in the world is painful and fundamentally wrong. Instead, when we focus on what we want to do and move towards that, we move into the abundance of our existing energy, our skills, and the way we want to flow in the world. In the episode of Lenny’s podcast, Joe Hudson shared the analogy of an oak tree. He says,

“At what time in the journey of an oak tree is it perfect? When it’s an acorn? When it’s a sprout? When it’s 20 years old, 40 years old, 150 years old? Two hundred years old, depending on the oak tree? Like, “Now, I’m perfect.” The idea is ridiculous. So it's a similar thing for us. So, the idea that I need to improve myself really disturbs the natural process that's at hand, which is that we evolve. We, as human beings, evolve.

And if it's like, oh, I'm evolving, and I can enjoy it. And I'm acting from my authenticity. Then that has a lot of alacrity. That moves quick. If it's I need to improve, there's something wrong with me. I need to improve; I should do it. That all goes really f*****g slow. Right. Because there's a lot of emotional stagnation in that."

So, I hope that you can take the next step, identify the next project you want to work on, and go for it. Not because getting that thing will make you richer or more successful and, therefore, more lovable. But because moving towards what you want is the natural next step in your evolution.

Good luck! That’s about it for now! I hope this resonated with you. I'll be back with more exciting updates soon, as I am working on a third book! Lol.

Love,

Tash

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