Self-development junkies, such as myself, who strive to constantly improve and become a better version of themselves tend to eventually fall into what I call “the self-development trap”.
The self-development trap is the cycle of perpetual learning, which takes place in an attempt to reach one’s goals, but merely gives us the illusion that we have progressed and more often than not, fails to bring us any closer to our dreams.
After years of engaging in “self-development behavior” (working out, listening to podcasts, reading books, buying a Whoop and gamifying my sleep, creating morning routines, learning to multitask, optimizing my time, etc), I finally woke up to the fact that the accumulation of knowledge without its thoughtful and consistent application is nothing more than a form of “mental-masturbation.”
I realized, that although I’ve become a time surgeon by meticulously operating the timeslots of my days to get the most out of them, my actual progress had flatlined and all I was doing was engaging in this mental masturbation of feeling good about myself because I was deceived by the illusion of progress.
The problem, I believe lies within the two most popular tools of self-development, podcasts and books.
Yes, listening to informative podcasts by the likes of Andrew Huberman and Chris Williamson can be educative and is a far better option than poisoning your mind with trash TV and watching teenagers with potentially mental issues dance on TikTok, but podcasts don’t really do much for you at the end of the day. They just sprinkle you with beautiful ideals, well-researched facts, and innumerable studies that momentarily leave you with a sense of awe and make you think “This idea will change my life”, only to give you enough dopamine to watch the next video and never act on the contents of the previous one.
Yes, reading books on how to master a certain skill such as sales or “how to be more happy and productive” is a far superior alternative to scrolling Instagram and might, in fact, improve your attention span, but unless you act upon that knowledge and apply it to your life with great intention (long enough to see any meaningful results), reading books is usually nothing more than high-level entertainment. We have allowed books to become a gateway from putting in the work and the act of reading has become a sort of intellectual procrastination.
The reality is that you are left behind because you consume too much!
All these successful people (singers, actors, business magnates, podcasters, athletes, speakers, and the like) that we look up to, have one thing in common:
They create more than they consume!
They are in constant movement. They too, have been tempted by the productivity gods to listen to 600 hours of podcasts and YouTube “research” before they open their own business or read 10 books on public speaking to prepare to land a job interview, but they realized that overconsuming other people’s information leaves you with no time to produce in your own life as well as with no adequate mental real-estate to think, analyze, and subsequently develop to who they want to be.
We’ve all heard that the average CEO reads a book a week, but that is a practice they can do now that they have the luxury of time and leverage which affords them to spend 15 hours a week reading and we all know that reading a book a week is not what made them successful.
What makes them so successful, is that they opt to take action and go do the thing they are supposed to do, then fail, iterate, and try again, again, and again, until their efforts compound and build an undeniable proof of competency that takes them where they aim to be.
Listening to a podcast is a one-way medium of broadcasting information (you can’t ask questions, you can’t participate in the conversation) and does not beat going out into the world and finding a real-life mentor who will guide you, keep you accountable, and push you to be the best version of yourself.
Reading a book is a good way to learn in ten hours what took someone else ten years to experience but does not suffice for taking action and learning from your own failures. The great books we read are not only outdated sometimes, but they lack the nuance of applicability in our unique life circumstances.
How can you listen to Bill Gates’s advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur when, as Malcolm Gladwell noted in his phenomenal book Outliers, Gates's own success recipe included two key ingredients that you do not possess: he was just at the right place at the right time.
You do not become rich, a critical thinker, or a good parent by following the daily rituals of “successful” people. Waking up at 5 am, doing a cold plunge, meditating, having a gratitude journal, breathing practices, or whatever the people that you lionize say that they do. Those are not the things that got them the status that you admire. What got them where they are is action, consistency, and perseverance.
Yes, acquiring positive habits is essential for the formation of the character of a successful person, but look at Warren Buffet who eats McDonald’s and drowns himself in Coca-Cola’s like there is no tomorrow, success (in any form that you wish it, not just material success) is a byproduct of simply doing the work. The self-development trap teaches us to engage in a never-ending ritual of preparation to do the work but it does do the work for us.
This essay by Strangest Loop perfectly encapsulates the illusion of taking action:
Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Scheduling time to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.
Telling people you're going to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Messaging friends who may or may not be doing the thing isn't doing the thing.
Writing a banger tweet about how you're going to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Hating on yourself for not doing the thing isn't doing the thing. Hating on other people who have done the thing isn't doing the thing. Hating on the obstacles in the way of doing the thing isn't doing the thing.
Fantasizing about all of the adoration you'll receive once you do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing. Reading about how other people did the thing isn't doing the thing. Reading this essay isn't doing the thing.
The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.
-Strangest Loop.
If I was to advise my younger self, I would tell him to stop justifying his lack of action with behaviors that give him a false sense of forward movement and that all these years of consuming “educational” content will take you nowhere unless you develop the discipline to do the things you promised yourself you are going to do. By staying congruent with the promises you made to yourself you will earn the most important trust there is, your own.