No self-improvement stories for 7 days. This is what happened.

BY TOM MITCHELL

As part of a talk I’m giving in dozens of cities around the world for the next couple of months, and for which I’m being handsomely paid, I’ll be describing my recent experience of not reading self-improvement stories for 7 days. My friends, most of whom are attractive twenty-somethings who work for the world’s largest and most influential tech companies, pleaded for me to commit these words to Medium and, in doing so, make a philanthropic gesture to those unable to attend my lectures but desperate to learn from my wisdom/success.

I didn’t sleep.

Without reading instructions on how best to sleep, I faced each nightfall with the dread of a reverse vampire. From schooldays in an exclusive boarding school, I remembered closing your eyes to be an important part of the sleep procedure but, with this accomplished, there remained so many continuing bedroom variables that an uninformed sleep was impossible.

To sleep with my totally hot 18 year old coder girlfriend? To lie on silk made by artisanal worms or on cotton grown by farmers who persuade the cotton to fall from the branches rather than directly picking it? I didn’t fucking know.

My productivity died.

Not sleeping makes you tired. Like really tired. Bushwhacked. But it wasn’t fatigue that did for my work-life. I’ve sufficient mental fortitude to cope with a lack of sleep. No self-improvement essays meant I didn’t know how to be productive. To be honest, I couldn’t even remember what ‘productivity’ actually meant. Something to do with ‘project’? I managed to clear my inbox. By block deleting unread messages. And that felt good. I looked out of the window. I picked my nose. I was threatened with a formal warning by the project manager. I spoke to the women of the office. I oiled my moustache. Everything but work.

I became less like Steve Jobs.

And I don’t mean I stopped wearing my turtleneck jumpers! No — I stopped taking risks. I stopped using the model of Apple’s commercial success under the leadership of the late (great) Steve Jobs as a way of moulding a better life. I even flirted with the idea of buying an Android tablet. Imagine. An. Android. Tablet.

I stopped doing things before 8 am.

If it hadn’t been for self-improvement pieces, I wouldn’t have even realised that time existed before 8 am. Before self-improvement pieces, I used to believe there was only one ‘6’ in the day — the early evening start-time for drinking IPA at the office knitting circle. No yoga. No lists. No mindfulness. This last week, I shudder to confess that I spent the majority of the time before 8 am in bed. And, as I’ve already intimated, I wasn’t even sleeping!

I didn’t become a millionaire.

Look, I wasn’t a millionaire before the break. But I was even more not a millionaire during it. I took a trip to the supermarket and spent a wedge of cash on goats-cheese-filled-peppers and sourdough bread. Who’s to say how things would have changed if I’d used that cash on a seed investment or buying a share of an Indian coal-mine?

I wrote no advice letters to my teenage self.

It’s a good job that the letters to my teenage self aren’t actually received by my teenage self. (That technology is yet to be invented.) Because my teenage self would have guessed something had happened to my old self. Like maybe I’d died. My teenage self was a smart kid. He’d have known that older people die. And, more seriously, without a letter from/to me, he probably still made the mistake of kissing Devon Harrison during the outward bound expedition to Scotland. The poor, poor boy.

No websites and no books made me smarter.

Another embarrassing confession — with no lists of books or websites to make me smarter, I had no idea what to read. So I did something I knew to be wrong, I knew, even, to be a little dirty — I read fiction.

It was boring. Like a film without pictures but with words that go in your eyes rather than your ears. If anything, reading fiction made me stupider. I would not recommend it!

(Unless it’s Game of Thrones.)

I didn’t get my dream job.

Hot tubs, hot babes, hot chocolate — not only my three favourite things but also my three primary skills. I’m yet to identify a specific career which could cover these three bases (hot tub sales, specialising in sales to hot babes, w/ free hot chocolate?). Self-improvement articles helped me identify that I shouldn’t treat work as work but as a hobby. But quitting reading the fuckers meant I didn’t know the next step. (Private message me if twenty-somethings do — especially if you’re a hot babe.)

I didn’t learn to code.

Software engineers get paid $$$. And all for playing World of Warcraft, pretty much. Next week, not only will I get back to the self-improvement pieces, but I’ll get started on Python too, I promise.