3 — Time is running out.
Whenever I hear “Self-help,” I am assaulted by images of cold showers, Alarm clocks ringing at 5:00 a.m., Zen masters looking to the wall, green smoothies, and sweaty guys yelling at me, “One more rep, bro!”
I have nothing against The Wim Hof method (cold showers after deep breaths), the 5 a.m. club, or drinking spinach smoothies like Popeye.
But for me, it’s essential to do all that crazy things for the right reason, or at least understand why.
Here are three harsh truths about why self-improvement it’s crucial for living a good life.
The passion doesn’t last forever.
I guess you think the desire is going to last forever. But passion doesn’t last forever. You won’t always want things to happen to you, not even good things.
You’re going to get sick of life, sick of taking hits, sick of getting up for the millionth time after falling nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand times.
You’re going to get tired of pretending you have passion. You won’t want to go on vacation. You won’t want to fall in love again. You won’t want to party with your friends. You won’t want to make new friends.
You’ll only want the routine and the boredom to stop hurting.
There comes a time in life when nothing happens without effort. Your body doesn’t lose weight as quickly as it did in your twenties, and it doesn’t matter how much you exercise. Your mind no longer learns as fast as it did in high school. Your illusion hides from you because, let’s face it. You have no more first times left.
And that’s when you need to do your part.
If you want to lose weight, you must learn to lose weight after forty.
If you want to study something new, you must work a hundred times harder than when you were young.
And if you want to regain your enthusiasm and not die of disgust on your couch eating Doritos and watching Netflix, you will have to generate momentum, and that’s where self-improvement can help you.
The feeling of progress generates momentum because you have new goals, which stimulates and gives you back the will to live.
There is something you know you must do.
When we are young, we think we are the masters of the world. We believe that everything is ours and that we owe nothing to anyone. The word thank you does not exist in our vocabulary.
We misbehave with the people who love us. And then time does the dirty work complicating everything, distancing us from those people who when we were young helped us and we did not thank them.
It could have been your father. It could have been your mother. Maybe a friend. And in the end, you acted like a jerk and lost touch with that person.
But you remember them often. And you’d like to have a coffee, but some wounds didn’t heal completely. So there is shame in your heart, and no one taught you how to ask for forgiveness.
You don’t know how to handle feelings that are confusing and complex. You don’t know how to show your vulnerability, but you know that you need to close stages, and you need to meet with that person and have a challenging but healing conversation.
Self-improvement is not only about making money but also about healing traumas to move forward and increase your self-esteem. And that’s why it’s so important.
Time is running out.
Before all left of your life are the Selfies you uploaded to Instagram, before your last day, your last afternoon, your last minute.
Before your house gets dusty, and people forget your name, before your sunrises are over, before all the stars in the sky, for you, go out, before, long before, you have to live.
And this party we call life will not last forever.
Many laugh at those of us who live so intensely on the whole issue of self-improvement, productivity, and anti-procrastination techniques. But the world is ending, at least yours, at least mine.
We are not eternal.
Understanding this changes your life.
It’s a reminder that at some point, the party ends. And I don’t want to miss the fun.
That’s why self-improvement is so important: it helps you make the most of life.
I don’t get up early, meditate, take ice baths, and drink green smoothies because it’s trendy. I do it because I want to live a full life. I do it because I want to make time to do all the things I want to do.
I do it because I want to improve as a human being. Do you?
A virtual hug
AG
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