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Fri | January 06, 2006

self-improvement

I am such a lunatic. I am not working at kaps today, and yet I did related work. I did a GRE essay. The idea with these is to agree or disagree, or take some sort of position on the statement. Crazily, this is supposed to be done in half an hour. This prompt was not that bad, but some of them are like meaning of life type questions where you're just like, you want me to tell you this now?

"The widespread idea that people should make self-improvement a primary goal in their lives is problematic because it assumes that people are intrinsically deficient."

The idea of self-improvement is erroneous not because of its assumption that people are intrinsically deficient, but because the goal is vague and not directed towards a well-defined, tangible result. As an example, take New Year's resolutions. Why do most people fail to attain their resolutions? And yet many people constantly achieve their goals. I would argue that it is because a resolution tends to be for some sort of behavioral change, like exercise more, or eat more vegetables-- to change yourself in some way. It is self-improvement. A goal, in contrast, is to use who you are already, to achieve some purpose. It is more tangible and defined; it has a beginning and an ending. You can be done with goals but you are never done with resolutions. A resolution is more difficult than a goal.

Should self-improvement be abandoned simply because it is difficult? In a way, yes. One of the characteristics of a good goal is that it is achievable. If the "goal" is a continual concept such as "self-improvement," one never feels done with it, and therefore never gets the good feeling of having accomplished it. A better way to improve oneself is to wrap self-improvement up in a goal. In other words, set a goal such that self-improvement is incorporated in the process of achieving the goal.

For example, say a person fears technology. Whenever she is on the computer she has a corrosive fear that something horrible is going to happen. The self-improvement goal "get over fear" is not good. Even if it is broken up into actions she can take to get over her fear, "fear" is too vague a feeling to quantify clearly. At one point does she feel fear? How much fear is too much? Must she be absolutely fearless to have achieved the goal? Even the technorati feel nervous about computer problems sometimes. However, say she sets a goal to make a website. She has always admired people who have websites-- they seem so techno-savvy, so up-to-the-trends. This is a tangible goal. When she finishes, she something to show people-- and to show herself the next time she feels technophobic.

This differs from a self-improvement goal because the goal was not to change herself, but to make a website. An increase in comfort with technology was a positive side effect of achieving the goal, but it wasn't the goal itself. This is significant because even if she feels fear in the future, this doesn't detract from what she has accomplished. Whereas if the goal was to "get over fear," then the moment she feels techno-terror, she has lost.

In some ways we are destined to always battle ourselves and our disadvantageous tendencies. However in the struggle to become a better person, it is inadvisable and misfocused to make "self-improvement" the goal. Self improvement comes in the process of achieving tangible, focused goals with a beginning and an ending-- goals which, once achieved, can never be taken away.

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