The Power of Immersion in Self-Development

How often do you really focus 100% on something without letting anything or anyone disturb your work? How often do you immerse yourself fully in something? Not too often, I’d guess. It’s rare these days.

There’s too much signal everywhere.

Yet, immersing yourself in something is a most rewarding thing and for many reasons. You get more done when you’re not multitasking. Your brains get a little break from the notification barrage coming at you from the cellphone. But most importantly, it helps you grow.

And growth is gold.

I’ve again managed to pick up the (excellent) habit of going for walks late at night (well, my late = 9pm).

It’s just me and the trees.

And two other people.

That is, I’m listening to podcasts. The clarity and the amount of well-formed, sharp thoughts after those walks is just unbelievable — especially if compared to the default “I’ll just sit here on the sofa and browse the Web”-type of gig. All because of immersing myself to the podcast instead of 30 different articles, emails, Spotify, YouTube etc. at the same time.

Multitasking destroys your ability to think clearly.

Recently on one of those walks I finished a podcast with Joe Rogan & Jocko Willink who talked for some 3 hours about a ton of things: raising kids, struggles in life, the importance of understanding the darker side of humans and generally just kicking ass (both are MMA guys / fighters).

Here’s the biggest thing I got out from the podcast:

A Recipe for Being Generally Happier and Living a Fulfilling Life

A simple recipe to be happier and have a meaningful life goes something like this:

1. Struggle: It’s not only ok, but even necessary to struggle in life. Without struggles, you’ll have no willpower to fight and get better in anything. If your life is too easy, find struggles. Start a new hobby that you suck at, and get better at it.
2. Be humble when starting: It’s really ok to be terrible when you start a new hobby (struggle). Growing is fulfilling and helps maintaining motivation.
3. Have patience and discipline: The only way to get really great at something is to have patience and discipline to train. Train consistently. Don’t expect to win anytime soon. Play the long game.
4. Kick ass, be yourself, be nice to people: Once you get great at something, don’t get cocky. Teach. Be humble. Train with people below and above your level.
5. Repeat: Pick up a new thing–a thing you suck at. And go back to step 1. Do it so that it somehow supports your “purpose” in life — whatever the purpose is.

This process is almost exactly what we’re teaching at Kaizen Hour. Maybe that’s why it resonated so well with me. Or maybe it’s just that when two gorillas who can destroy you in an instant say it…you’ll listen to it.

Getting better makes you happy. And immersion, patience and discipline will make you better in absolutely anything and everything you every wish to pursue in life.

I science around at simohosio.com, try to be a better human at kaizenhour.com and regularly fail to be funny at Twitter (SimoHosio)!