“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
There are many things I do to improve my life, but they can all be placed into 2 broad groups. The first group are simply my goals – split up into Yearly, Monthly, Weekly, and Daily goals. You can read my process for goal-setting here.
Besides setting goals, the other thing I do for myself is a set of Self-Improvement Exercises:
Time Management analysis
Three Columns of Fear
The Pillars of a Balanced Life
Council of Advisors
Social Improvement
Meditation
Perfect Day exercise
There are seven exercises listed. Coincidentally, I do one exercise each day of the week. But make up your own system – maybe you will only like some of these exercises. Maybe you want to do three of them a day. It’s totally up to you – there are no set rules.
Let’s get into the details of each exercise:
Time Management analysis
This exercise was inspired by the idea that sometimes a NOT-to-do list is more important than a to-do list.
What are you spending your time on? Make two lists.
The first list is good activities. These are things you do that make your life better, and things you should spend even more time doing.
The second list is bad activities. These are activities that make your life worse, and things you should spend less time doing.
Example:
| Good Activities | Time I spend | Time I need to spend |
| Cardio exercise | X Minutes | X Minutes |
| Meditating | X Minutes | X Minutes |
| Developing businesses | X Minutes | X Minutes |
| Bad Activities | X Minutes | X Minutes |
| Drinking alcohol | X Minutes | X Minutes |
| Playing video games | X Minutes | X Minutes |
| Socializing with the wrong people | X Minutes | X Minutes |
(80/20 Principle)
Three Columns of Fear
I heard about this simple exercise through Tim Ferriss. It is about identifying and conquering your fears.
On a sheet of paper, create 3 columns:
- In the 1st column, write down the greatest fears that you are facing at the moment.
- In the 2nd column, write down the worst possible thing that could happen if your fear came true.
- In the 3rd column, write down what you could do to return to a normal life if your worst fear in column 2 came true.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s pretend that…
(1) You want to ask for a pay raise at work but are afraid to do so. The worst possible thing that could happen is…
(2) Your boss denies you the raise, and verbally insults you as a person. He tells you to go fuck yourself. To get back to a normal life, you could…
(3) Remind yourself that your boss isn’t a good person and that there are tons of better people out there who deserve your time. As for the raise, you wait and ask for a raise at another time, or even find a better job.
Once you work through the worst-possible scenarios, you inevitably realize that “Hey, it’s not that bad!”
The Pillars of a Balanced Life
A few years ago, I was struggling and going through my “Quarter-Life Crisis”, so I went to see a Psychologist. He had me fill out some papers and do some exercises, and one that really stood out to me was The Pillars of a Balanced Life.
It looks almost like an elementary school assignment. This exercise may seem similar to some of the other exercises here, but I find that its simplicity still helps me.
[Include PDF for printing out]
It breaks your life down into 10 components (Family, Professional, Overall Satisfaction, etc.). In each column, you make two lines: where you think your life is today, and where you want to be someday.
After filling out the sheet, take a look at which columns have the biggest gap between where you are now and where you want to be. These are the areas of your life you should put extra focus on.
Council of Advisors
This is an exercise from the 1937 book “Think and Grow Rich”.
The idea is to write down a list of several mentors and historical figures that you greatly admire. Then, whenever you are facing a problem in life, you ask yourself, “What would my mentors say?” Imagine sitting down to a large table with these great people and explaining your problems to them. What would they tell you?
[Include picture of advisers on wall]
Social Improvement
Meditation
I’m no expert on meditation, so I’m not going to write much here. Start small – just a 3-minute session of silence and focusing on your breathing.
If you want a place to start, I would recommend reading Sam Harris’s guides to meditation. He practices Vipassana meditation.
Perfect Day exercise
In this exercise, imagine what your perfect day would be like. Start from the very moment you wake up, and simulate in great detail what the entire day would look like until you fall asleep.
The purpose of this exercise is to visualize and identify what kind of life you really want, which will make it easier for you to SET GOALS to bring yourself toward that destination.
Perhaps you wake up in bed with your spouse, and you eat breakfast with your family. Then you work in the garden and play some music in the studio in your house. Then you go to your laboratory and look at tiny organisms through your microscope, and gaze at the horizon and the sky through your telescope. Perhaps you have extended family and friends over to your house for dinner and storytelling.
Conclusion:
Find what works for you and stick with it. And be sure to avoid “Epiphany Addiction”. We are wired to always want to seek out new information – but once you have the best possible methods, you may be seduced to try out new things, when what you have works fine.