Never Out of Growing Opportunities
Friday Prompt: At what point are you good enough? When are you self-improved enough to accept yourself?
We begin our life journey with 20ish years of ongoing learning, studying, growing — both physically and personally. While teachers encourage us to be more attentive and improve our grades, parents try their best to make us improve our attitude. Throughout these years, our surroundings push us to focus on self-improvement, self-growth, and personal development at the same time. They just don’t put specific words on it.
When Googling self-improvement, the first proposed definition refers to it as “the improvement of one’s knowledge, status, or character by one’s own efforts”. It can apply to almost any area and it’s exactly what’s expected of us throughout childhood and adolescence.
Then comes a big step. From the moment we end our studies or leave our parents’ house, we get to decide whether we wish to keep on this improvement journey. There’s no one to encourage us to surpass ourselves anymore—at least not with the same influence.
Yet could one succeed in their dream without changing, adapting themself, growing, in order to reach their goals? As the great Benjamin Franklin put it,
“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
Until not long ago, I was convinced that it was an ex-boyfriend who had opened the self-improvement ‘world’ to me, sharing the numerous books and articles he used to read on the subject. But taking a step back, I realized he simply put a word on what I was already doing; on what many of us are constantly doing.
Seeking Improvement
For as long as I can remember, I have always sought improvement.
As a small child, I was the one who asked my parents to stop using diapers at an early age— they are actually still proud of this! I guess I wanted to be like my older siblings. Then when I was 7 or so, I was put in a two-level class at school where the same teacher had to teach two different school year classes in parallel. I was part of the youngest group, but many times I stayed with the other group during breaks to do the exercises the teacher gave them. Sometimes I also wrote down their homework so I could do it too.
In my early teenage years, I started watching series in original version with subtitles in the original language. I remember I used to pause the episode almost every time there was a new word or expression so I could write it down. I ended up with dozens of pages full of English vocabulary and expressions that I regularly reviewed before going to sleep.
At the university, when we had optative subjects to choose, I remember my friends saying, almost scandalized, “why do you want to take that one, it’s too hard, don’t take risks and choose the same as us”. I still picked the hardest one and it required hard work, but I learned not only in terms of knowledge in the field but also in terms of keeping up a challenge.
However, that constant craving for improvement can be a ‘burden’ sometimes.
A few years ago I got to a point where I put so much pressure on myself I couldn’t even enjoy watching a series episode or doing anything else than improving myself in some way. I had to keep reading, learning, working on personal projects. And I felt guilty when I didn’t. Eventually, I got to a point where I couldn’t take it anymore and spent a few months doing the total opposite. It had been too much pressure for something I used to enjoy doing.
I am still fighting against that constant pressure for improvement. Now, it’s easier to disconnect and take time for myself without feeling guilty, but I still feel bad when I spend a whole weekend without working at least a little on my personal projects or learning something.
Infinite Possibilities
I found that the more I learn, open my horizons, grow as a person; the more I realize it is a lifelong process, with so many things to work on, to improve. In some way, that’s also one of the great things in life: you’ll never run out of things to experiment, to discover, to learn. As Steve Jobs put it, “Learn continually — There is always one more thing to learn.”
That’s why I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough. But is there even such a thing as being good enough? Can we actually measure it? I don’t think so. Because the more you grow, the more possibilities you have to grow even more. The more you improve yourself, the more your goals evolve and become clearer.
Yet it doesn’t mean you can’t accept yourself as you are. In fact, it seems that accepting oneself is the first step to improving. When you accept yourself as who you are, not only do you see your qualities and strengths through a realistic lens; you also accept your flaws and imperfections. You become more aware of how far you’ve come, how much you’ve improved. And how much room there is still left for further growth.
And once you accept yourself, you can start seeing improvement as a consequence of thinking “I could become even better”, instead of “I’m not good enough”.
Thank you 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊. for this amazing prompt!
