Complete Self-Improvement Guide
Everything I Wish I Knew Before Starting
Before we start, I would like to congratulate you. With all the cheap entertainment you could have chosen, you decide to read something that will benefit your life.
The number of people who spend their time working hard on themselves or something that they find important, compared to others who only seek short-term pleasure, is 1 to 100, so you are already in the top 1 percent.
But being in the top one percent these days is not all that impressive; you just need to do the bare minimum. Being in the top one percent of the top one percent, now that is a whole other game.
This is exactly what this article will help you become.
Why listen to me?
I have been on self-improvement for 5 years and counting. Ever since Jordan Peterson started popping off and all these productivity YouTubers started sharing their morning routines. Saw it all, done it all.
Now I want to give you my full guide to self-help for anyone starting, and even if you have been on this journey longer than me, I hope you can still learn something.
How to change
There are three things you can change about yourself.
You can change the way you think, what you say, and what you do.
Every single one of these things ultimately affects your identity.
“But I don’t want to change who I am to reach some goals.”
At its core, you are still the same person, but if you wish to achieve success, you must change your character traits.
Let’s take a look at each one to see how it affects us and how we can use it to better ourselves.
Thinking
It has been known for millennia that what you think determines who you are.
Every religion, from Christianity and Islam to Hinduism and Buddhism, talks about it, but for some reason, we are not aware of it.
First of all, we are not aware of our thoughts. Tell me what your last three thoughts have been. You don’t have to know them in detail, but do you remember having them?
There is an ongoing mixtape playing in your mind, telling you who you are, how you’re supposed to act, and what you can and can’t do.
We need to change that mixtape.
No surprise, this is a really hard task to accomplish. I am going to give you some tools to help you out, but directing your mind is something you are going to have to do yourself.
The first step is to start meditating. Meditation, simply put, allows you to notice your thoughts. Forget all the other benefits you have been told about why you should meditate; the only thing you have to keep in mind is that it allows you to catch your thoughts.
Why is this important?
Let’s say you get thoughts about doing some bad habit. Before meditating, you would have just done it, but now you can observe your thoughts, your body, and, by doing so, give yourself back control.
You might constantly think of yourself as inferior to others and have accepted it as a fact. If you start meditating over time, you will be able to catch those thoughts and say that’s not true.
The next thing you have to do is change the inputs you receive.
Let me give you an example that I noticed in my life.
There was a period of time when, for some weird reason, I was constantly thinking about relationships. It’s not that I had a particular person who I was talking to or anything, but my mind was just hyper-focused on it.
What I’m about to say might sound like total BS to some of you, but hear me out.
At the same time, I was listening to a lot of music, for a couple of hours a day. The songs were mostly in English and because English is not my first language and I generally don’t pay attention to lyrics I just picked songs that I like the melody of.
And what are almost all the songs about? I love her; she maybe sort of likes me; we break up, bla bla bla.
Does it not make sense that if you listen to something all day, every day, it reprograms your subconscious mind? And it’s not just music; look at the content you are consuming and the people you are surrounding yourself with.
My last piece of advice when it comes to changing the way you think is to ask yourself, “What are the limiting beliefs I have that are holding me back?”
Don’t just skip this part; actually do it.
Talking
This is the part that everyone skips. You will occasionally hear someone say that it’s important what you think, and it’s a pretty known fact that you are what you do.
But no one seems to realize that you are also what you say. Let me give you my approach to speaking so that, if you wish, you can copy it.
If you recall what I’ve said when it comes to changing your inputs, this is the opposite; these are your outputs. What you say reflects who you are, and it’s 10 times more effective than hearing it in a song or seeing it on TV, so you need to pay very close attention to how you speak.
Let me give you an example.
On my way to lecture, me and my friends have to climb for like six floors because that is where our lecture hall is. And every time there is someone complaining about why it’s so high or how it’s too hard, They are saying it is sort of half-jokingly, but remember what I said about listening to songs?
Well, the same goes for this. Say something is hard, and even if you are joking, after some time you will start believing your lies.
Pay close attention to these types of situations in your own life, and be careful how you speak.
One more extra tip I have for you if you wish to improve your speaking and, hence, your social skills is to record yourself when you hang out with your friends. I know it might sound weird, but considering how present we actually are in social settings, this can serve as something you can listen to and see what you were saying, whether the way is appropriate, whether you could have said it in a different way, etc.
Doing
This is what 99 percent of self-improvement is.
If saying is 10 times more effective than hearing, then doing is 100 times more effective than saying.
These are all the habits and morning routines associated with self-improvement, so I won’t go too much into all that in this chapter.
Now that you know how to improve, let’s go to…
What to improve
There are an infinite number of things one can improve about himself. I am going to give you a broad list of things everyone aspires to improve, but your job is to figure out what is holding you back the most.
You can’t focus on everything at the same time. You can focus on a couple of things, but realize that you only have so much time in a single day.
This brings me to…
Goal setting
What I want you to do is grab a pen and paper, go through the titles, and pick a couple that you would like to improve.
One of the most important things when it comes to goal-setting is the fact that less is more.
What I see a lot of people do is feel like they are so behind in life and end up biting more than they can chew.
This way, they make their lives full of boring to-do lists that never seem to go away.
Self-improvement is a way of life; it’s not something you do for a month and then stop.
It’s supposed to be fun and exciting; otherwise, you won’t do it, or if you somehow manage to push past all the resistance, you will turn your life into hell.
Once you have your list, go to the next chapter.
Why self-improvement
Choosing your goals is like going to the store and picking your favorite foods.
“I’ll start going to the gym so that I can look good; I’ll learn communication skills so that people admire me when I talk; and I’ll start a business so that I can be rich and successful.”
Look at your list, and next to your goals, write down why you actually want to do the things you want to do.
Going to the gym so that you can look good will only take you so far, but going to the gym so that you can be around longer for people you care about is a whole other thing.
I am not saying you need to have all these noble reasons for why you want to do something. Most guys I know started going to the gym so that I could pull more girls.
The point of this exercise is that when those bad days come and you don’t want to make good habits, you have something to look at and ask yourself: Is watching YouTube really more important than what I set out to do?
Talking about habits…
How to build good habits and break bad habits
Everything you are going to do for self-improvement is some sort of habit.
Becoming healthy requires the habit of eating clean and going to the gym. Being more mindful requires the habit of meditation, and so on.
The first book I ever read on self-improvement was Atomic Habits by James Clear, and if you have never read it, I strongly recommend you do so.
Here is what I took from the book that helped me build good habits.
Make it easy.
Make it so that doing it your habit is as easy as brushing your teeth in the morning. That means having a routine.
Do your habit at the same place at the same time each day. Make sure you have everything prepared for your habit. Pair it with other habits that you already have in place.
Let me give you an example to illustrate the point.
Let’s adopt the habit of meditation. When I meditate, I do it first thing in the morning, right after I use the bathroom. I always do it in the same place, and I always take my phone with me since I use an app for meditating.
Cut out all the resistance
You don’t want any friction between you and your habit. It is a lot easier for me to go to my home gym than for someone to drive half an hour to the local gym. Think of all the ways you could make your habit frictionless.
If you want to play the guitar, instead of having it in a case, put it somewhere where you can pick it up and play.
Want to drink more water? Buy one of these big bottles, fill it up in the morning, and you don’t have to spend the whole day thinking about it.
Breaking bad habits
There is only one way I have found to break bad habits. And that is making it impossible to do them.
You can have the best system in place, but once your brain has had enough of it, it will convince you to do it.
When you get an urge, let’s say, for junk food, the front part of your brain responsible for decision-making gets put in the passenger seat, and you lose your rational decision-making.
I know it sounds weird to say that your brain takes control of you to get what it wants, turning you into a zombie, but think about how often you actually notice yourself scrolling on social media.
The good news is that the more time you spend away from your bad habits, the fewer urges you have and the more control you gain until they no longer feel like a part of your life.
Let’s say you want to eat sugar. You could try convincing yourself that you can moderate how much you eat and that you will only eat one meal. 10 cookies later, and what you should have done is never buy cookies in the first place.
If you can control how much time you spend on your bad habits and only watch TikTok for 5 minutes, go ahead. I’d rather install an app like NoScroll so that I don’t have a choice whether I watch it or not.
Now that you are working on your habits, let’s go to my two non-negotiable habits.
Exercise
There is a quote I heard a long time ago that I believe perfectly summarizes the importance of exercise.
I butcher it, but it goes something like, “If you could turn all the benefits of exercise into a pill, it would be the most prescribed pill in the world.
I won’t bore you with all the health benefits that exercise provides; you know that already.
I am, however, going to bore you with the effects of exercise on your brain because it’s so important and no one is talking about it.
There have been numerous studies showing that students who exercise outperform those who don’t.
Remember how at the beginning I mentioned how you have limited time in the day and that you need to be careful what you focus your time and attention on?
What if you could hack that — not time, but attention?
Research indicates that exercise boosts the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein crucial for brain function and learning.
This means that exercise significantly affects brain function, enhancing learning efficiency, stress management, anxiety reduction, mood improvement, and focus.
Exercise has been shown to boost motivation by increasing dopamine storage and promoting the creation of dopamine receptors in the brain’s reward center.
For those who don’t know, dopamine plays a crucial role in the brain’s reward center, influencing motivation, attention, and a sense of satisfaction when accomplishing tasks.
It’s the new hot thing in the self-help space that everyone is trying to “hack” with things like dopamine detox, biohacking, and so on.
But that’s a topic for another time.
If you are not exercising already, find some things you enjoy and try combining both strength and cardio workouts into your plan.
Learning
My other non-negotiable is learning.
There is a famous saying by Abraham Lincoln: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
This is something that everyone skips out on because school has made you believe that learning is something boring and only for people who don’t have anything better to do in their lives.
Imagine if, your whole life, you learned important things in school. What kind of person would you be if instead of learning about the capital cities, you were learning about making money, how to understand and regulate your emotions, how to be a good partner, friend, parent, etc.?
No one teaches you these things, because the truth is that the most powerful thing in this world is knowledge.
And not just any knowledge, but the right kind of knowledge.
Even someone’s results in the gym can be explained by knowledge, and not just that he knows how to exercise better than you, but he also knows how to motivate himself and how to not cheat on his diet.
There is a story in the Bible where God asks Solomon what he wants. If you were Solomon, what would you choose: more money, fame, or power? Solomon chose wisdom, and all other things came as consciences.
If you made it this far into the article, that means you understand the importance of learning, so props to you.
Mental health
If you think mental health is only reserved for people who are depressed or anxious, think again.
If you procrastinate, don’t feel motivated, skip the things you are supposed to do, and instead spend time on social media, you have bad mental health.
100 years ago, if someone was lying in bed all day doing nothing, they would be considered sick, and today that is completely normal.
But I am on my phone. Yes, the fact that you are mindlessly staring into a small entertainment box makes you look even better.
I hope you can realize how important this is and that you will take my advice.
How to fix it
Remember how I mentioned dopamine? Well, whether you know something about dopamine or not, big companies know a lot, and they are using this knowledge to make you addicted.
This is why you must find ways to break these bad habits. If you must, go back and read the chapter on breaking bad habits, and when it comes to how to break a phone addiction, I will make a post about that soon.
If you want to improve your mental health, I have made a complete breakdown, which you can read here:
Social skills
If you solely focus on improving yourself, you will forget the fact that there are other people in this world, and whether you like it or not, you will have to interact with them.
For some, this might be easy; for others, not so much.
If you are someone who is scared to talk to people and introduce yourself, this won’t help you.
This is for people who can make friends but don’t know how to get some interesting conversations started or have trouble getting close to people.
By far the most powerful thing when it comes to making real friends and being that guy that everyone likes to talk about is not having interesting stories or fun-prepared topics.
It’s simply becoming interested in the other person. You can literally spend hours talking to someone just by asking them questions.
Just ask people questions, listen carefully, and ask them more questions. You can share your opinions and tell your own stories, of course, but if you don’t have anything interesting to say, just ask questions.
There is nothing people love more than talking about themselves.
The other thing everyone gets wrong about social skills is thinking that if you learn enough about them, everyone will like you. They treat it like a game in which they try to get the most out of every conversation. They only focus on themselves and how they can be more interesting, forgetting that the conversation is supposed to be about understanding the other person.
Who would you rather talk to: someone who has amazing stories but only talks about himself, or someone who doesn’t have much in his life but is interested in you as a person?
Biohacking
If biohacking sounds intimidating, it’s just a group name for things like taking a cold shower, taking supplements, avoiding plastic, etc.
I will give you some basics and what they do so that you can decide if you want to incorporate them into your daily routine.
There are hundreds of different hacks out there, but I will just give you a couple that I personally do that give me great results.
Cold showers
If you’ve never taken cold showers, you have to try them. Not for any health benefit, but doing so gets you out of your comfort zone.
I recently saw an Andrew Huberman podcast, which you should definitely check out, in which the topic was the anterior midcingulate cortex. It’s basically the part of the brain responsible for doing hard things.
The bigger your anterior midcingulate cortex, the more discipline you have. How do you increase it? By doing hard things. I know that is not something you want to hear, but it’s the truth.
The more you do hard things, the easier they become. But also, the less hard you do, the smaller your anterior midcingulate cortex gets.
So if you spend your whole life sitting on the couch, going to the gym might seem impossible.
I was never that big of an athlete, but training for a couple of years prior to going to the gym made it so that I was not skipping a day, and building that habit came relatively easy.
Viewing Sunlite
This became a hit when Andrew Huberman started promoting it as one of the most important things you can do for your health. The basic idea is that viewing sunlight first thing in the morning sets your circadian rhythm, which allows all your hormones to sync up.
Just going outside first thing in the morning and viewing sunlight, which does not mean staring at the sun but offsetting your gaze by about 10 to 20 degrees from it, for 5 or 10 minutes gets me awake and ready for the day.
Supplements
Again, you can really try a lot of things here and see what works. Over the years, I’ve tried a bunch and now stick to the basics like creatine, omega 3, vitamin D depending on how the weather is, and sometimes L-thyroxine before cognitively straining work.
Intermittent fasting
The reason I do intermittent fasting is one: I don’t want to waste the most productive time, aka right when I wake up, making my breakfast, and two, I feel like I am more focused.
Try intermittent fasting for a couple of days, maybe with something like bullet coffee, and see how it affects your performance.
Sleep optimizing
This is something I already covered, so you can read it here:
Looksmaxing
Looksmaxing is a fancy new-age tool for enhancing your looks. It’s a term that targets mostly men.
I don’t want to go too much into detail since I already wrote an article on this topic, which you can read here:
Making money
There will come a point in your self-improvement journey where you will want to make some money. You’ll want to become this digital nomad, working from anywhere, anytime.
I won’t teach you how to make money, but I want you to keep in mind two things.
First, why do you want to make that money? Is it because you think having nice things is going to make you happy, or do you think that with more money you can have a bigger impact on the world?
The second thing is how you are going to acquire that money. Here, I just have one thing to tell you: learn.
Final words
With everything so far we covered most areas of life. This could have been 10 times longer but as a starting point, it should do the trick.
Everyone’s journey is different so make sure you reflect on your life and see what really needs improvement and what would be just nice to have.
If you are unsure about the way you want your life to go try developing a practice of journaling.
Ask yourself important questions and if you are honest with yourself you will get the answer.
It might not be the answer you were looking for, but it’s the one you need to attend to.
If you want to keep learning about self-improvement follow me and don’t forget to:
Keep learning, keep improving and I will see you next time.
