A few random thoughts on growth, prompted by some observations of myself, friends, and coaching clients.
Boredom is good. It means that you've reached a new level. Staying bored is really bad, because it means that you aren't moving on to the next thing. So enjoy it for a moment, and then make sure you don't feel it for a while.
People generally grow in one area at once. If you're trying to make too much progress in too many areas, you're risking none of them succeeding. If you focus on one thing, track it, and course-correct, it will probably work eventually . You can maintain or slowly improve others.
Results don't always come at the same time as process. So sometimes you work on all the right things, see metrics improving, but the results still aren't there. That's okay, it's still growth. Sometimes the opposite happens and results all come at once, thanks to work you've put in in the past.
For example, if you're working on storytelling, empathy, hitting the gym, and getting out there and talking to girls, it may still take a long time before you actually meet someone and find a great girlfriend. Or if you're improving your work habits it may take a while for you to find the right application.
The point of growth isn't that you're not good enough, it's that growth is the process of engaging with life. There's no conflict between being happy with who you are and enjoying the moment and trying to become even better.
If you aren't trying to grow, then you've either lost your ambition or you're arrogant enough to think you can't get better.
Growth on its own is good because you learn about yourself and your process for self-improvement. Growth applied towards something you actually care about is a whole lot better. Make sure you're choosing your targets, not society or someone else.
Coasting is very easy, as is doing what your peers do. Surround yourself with other people who focus on growth. As time passes you won't look with envy upon those who didn't focus on it. With the right group of friends, growth becomes almost automatic because it's hard to stagnate when no one else you know is.
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Photo is some nice tea I bought here in Chengdu, China. I'm traveling here with my girlfriend for another few days. Cool city!
Sorry this one is a little short. The other posts I have in mind are long and ambitious and I've had a lot of work to fit in while traveling.
I'm thrilled that Tynan is coming to you with two things -- first, he's offering a breakthrough session through GiveGetWin. It's geared around doing more of the kind of excellent work you want to do, becoming more internally focused with your emotions, having a more enjoyable life, building great habits, and producing a lot of value in the process. There's five spots, so check it out now.
Second, we have this wonderful tour-de-force interview: it starts by covering how Tynan made the shift from unfocused to focused, how to derive internal enjoyment from things, useful actionable exercises you can do right now, Tynan's method and mindset for producing creative work consistently, how to set up great habits and an excellent mental and physical work environment, and how to make blogging work and similar endeavors work for you.
Total Focus; Total Enjoyment by Tynan, as told to Sebastian Marshall
When I turned 30 and I had a minor freak out… I thought, "I'll be 40 in not long, and then 50… there's things I want to do in my life, and they're not happening at this pace."
Before that, I had a general idea of things I wanted to do and have in my life, but I went about in an unstructured way. It was good in a lot of ways. It made be a broad process, but not much depth.
Jason Shen has achieved tremendous success in athletics, technology entrepreneurship, writing, and living an outstanding life. To promote his recent GiveGetWin deal on The Science of Willpower, he sat down to tell us how he started learning about willpower, the state of what's known scientifically about how willpower and the brain work, and how you can start improving your life right away by implementing a tiny habit, thinking and systems, and using some powerful thinking tools. Enjoy:
Developing Willpower by Jason Shen, as told to Sebastian Marshall
Willpower has been an undercurrent in my entire life. In gymnastics, you have to use your willpower to overcome your fear of an activity and go for the skill you want, to get over the fear, to push yourself to finish your conditioning and strength training a part of you doesn't want to…
It didn't come automatically to me. When I was a student, I wasn't automatically self-disciplined. There were actions I knew were useful, like doing my homework in one session without getting distracted, or not throwing clothing on my apartment floor. But I wouldn't always do them, and I didn't know why.
I started to learn those answers during a student initiative course at Stanford called The Psychology of Personal Change. That's when I first started reading academic papers on the topic. In academia, willpower and self-discipline is often called "self-regulation," and in 2009 I started to get really serious about it from an academic perspective -- and saw gains from it in my personal life.
