Why don’t you try to improve yourself?

After a 4-month journey into self-improvement, I feel that I have learned so many things about life, myself and opportunities we all have. This has caused me great pleasure and more hope than I ever thought I could have.

Through all this though, one negative thought has appeared: if it is that “easy”, then why aren’t there more people trying?

If you haven’t ever heard of self-improvement, then it would make sense. As goes the proverb: Ignorance is bliss.

Indeed, if you have never heard of self-improvement, then it is possible that the thought of it could never cross your mind and as such, you would just let yourself follow the flow of your life without trying so hard. I would hope for you that you would realize the possibilities you have, but it would not surprise me if you didn’t.

This being said, if you have heard of incredible stories of people’s evolution, if you know someone who is trying to improve, then why not give it a try? What is there to lose?

This has gotten so important and frustrating to me that I have searched for reasons and found a few ones:

1. Fear

One of the main reasons people do not even try is the fear of failure. Since we were born, we were taught to avoid making mistakes, that in order to be successful, we should work hard and avoid failures. This has been ingrained into us and made us worry about not getting the desired results.
Even if we have ideas, we will usually put them off until we perceive them as easier. But what for then? So many things end up being easier than we expected when we give them a try.

Unfortunately, there’s only one thing to do in such situations: Forget your fear and give it a go. Inaction is your worst enemy.

2. Envy

People will prefer looking at you than doing it themselves. The envy takes over and doesn’t leave space for trying out ideas. We are constantly looking at Facebook, Instagram or news of friends or celebrities who “have succeeded” and look up to them. This culture of looking while not acting is killing our will to act. We instead end up envying those people, say things such as “I’m not like you. I can’t do this.”, without even trying.
We are all aware that we act like this. But this also hides a second fear connected to that of failure: the fear of public shame.

For this, the best solution is to dig deeper into some of the successful people and find out how most of them came from nothing and just worked their ass off, not caring about others’ opinion.

3. Comfort of your life

Whether your life is going well or not, you are used to it. If it is going well, then why risk losing that? If it is going bad, then why risk making it worse? Making a change seems complicated, tiring and just plainly hard. You have been able to live your life until now so you know you can keep on doing it. Whether you like it or not. However, you should always remember this: laziness is your biggest enemy.

Take some time, weight the potential positive and negative outcomes and consider whether they are worth it. Then, decide if you want to keep living as you are. I bet you won’t.

4. Thought process problem

This being said, I think the biggest problem comes from the amount of opportunities in front of them. When you start hearing about self-improvement, you will be aware of the above problems. However, when you have never (deeply) thought about what you want to do, where you want to go, and start wondering about it. You end up even more not knowing what to do.

There are so many doors to open, so many opportunities and yet, you just want to start right now. And there it comes: you’re acting without knowing why. This thus creates a contradiction into you and may make you so confused that you will stop actually take action.

Originally published at yuhakko.wordpress.com on November 18, 2018.