Stop Reading Self Improvement Books
I am a confessed self improvement addict. If there’s a book out there, or a podcast, or YouTube video, that promises me I can live a better life by following their 4 steps, you can bet your life on it I’ll consume that content.
Over the years I’ve built a library of over 100 self improvement / personal development books. Most of them I have read fully, a few I haven’t started yet, and a small percentage that I never finished because they were, how can I say this elegantly, crap.
What’s the greatest lesson that I’ve learned from all this beautiful knowledge? I’ve learned that no matter how good the ‘5 tips’ are or the ‘3 steps’, nothing will ever change from just absorbing the content, it will only change the moment you start to apply the content.
Unfortunately, this took me nearly 6 years to learn. I thought the mere fact that I was consuming so much content, well, I was a fountain of knowledge, and that’s why I had an amazing fulfilling life, right? Wrong. Being a fountain of knowledge may be great to some extent, but being stuck in the exact same spot in life after taking in 100’s of hours of valuable information, that was just sickening.
A couple of weeks ago I was reading one of the latest titles I downloaded onto my kindle, Ultralearning. I devoured the first half of the book and my mind raced as I thought of all the fun things I could go off and learn, in an ‘ultralearning’ fashion. And then just as I finished another page, a thought popped into my head that would lead me to embark on a completely new journey.
I stopped and thought, ‘What if instead of just consuming, I actually put in the hours and do the work?’…
It scared me because I felt safe in my consumption filled world, without ever having to put myself out there. The possibility of actually trying these things that I learned would throw me out into the wilderness that lay outside of my comfort zone. Now that I was aware of this thought, I couldn’t just shut it off.
My next thought was something along the lines of, ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen?’
So from that very moment I deceided that I would not consumer anymore self improvement content, at all, until I start working on myself and applying the knowledge that I already learned. I started this about 3 weeks ago and so far I’ve got a lot of work done on a webiste project that I always dreamed about. I have no prior website building experience, but it’s a fun project that’s teaching me new skills along the way, and that’s something I can’t get from simply reading.
If you have been stuck in the never ending cycle of self improvement, without any action, this is the sign you’ve been looking for. Stop reading self improvement books and pick up the tools to start your next project.
