Self-Improvement

It's easy to sit here, at 3:50 AM, and read blogs about productivity. It's easy to be inspired by some of the most inspirational people in the world.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Good Will Hunting. There's a scene in the movie (probably one of the most famous scenes of the movie, but I haven't done any research on it) where Will explains to a seemingly smart college student where he went wrong with his life. He spoke about the college student's blatant plagiarism of ideas - he was simply memorizing words from textbooks and regurgitating them in order to seem smart. Not only did he not truly understand what he was saying, but he was paying a ton of money in order to obtain this lack of understanding. He explains that the college student spent $150,000 on something he could have gotten for $1.50 in late fees at the library.

The fact that I took away from that scene is this: knowledge is free. Knowledge is more free now than it was when the movie was made - things like MIT's OpenCourseWare, Udemy, EdX, Udacity, etc. have been teaching countless students in countless subjects for long enough now. Late fees at the library aren't needed.

What is needed?

• Motivation
• Time

That's it. Not only that, but we have time. If there's time to sit here writing this, there's time to use for other things. Of course, I was never a fan of the scary concept that if there's time to partake in leisure activities, there's time to study/work/etc. When I was younger, I was exposed to a quote that made me feel uneasy about myself. It was about how while one person was sitting and watching TV, another was training, honing their skills in their craft. While I understand how the quote could motivate, it also made me feel like crap for relaxing. Did the person that was honing their skills never take any time off? It's important to relax as much as you need to keep your brain active when it needs to be. I feel like lifting weights demonstrates this excellently. It's important for your muscles to rest, so they can rebuild the microscopic tears you made while bench pressing your new personal record. In my opinion, the brain functions the same way.

Motivation is the harder of the two requirements to tackle. It can't just be fleeting - for any appreciable changes to occur, one needs to work over a long period of time. Just like how you can't just decide to work out with extreme intensity for a week and expect the same results as working out at a lower intensity for two months. Motivation stems from passion. Passion is hard to just create, but I feel like you can create it the same way you can create confidence: fake it for a while. It sounds dumb, but that's how self-confidence worked for me, and I can only apply my own experiences to subjects like this if I want to be sure about what I'm saying.

In conclusion, I want to say that I struggle with self-improvement just as much as anyone else. I, however, feel a strong urge to make a change in my lifestyle (it's summer, and I've had enough of this whole "relaxation" thing - so much that I actually want to occupy myself with something that challenges me mentally/physically). I want to turn this urge into results. I'll update on where this goes on the blog. I might do video blogs or something. I'm not sure yet. Thanks for reading.