Self-Improvement Doesn’t Have An End, It Is The End
The true purpose of personal growth
I like Mark Manson.
Apart from Wait But Why, at which Tim Urban never posts anything anymore anyway, he’s the only blogger whose new articles I check out immediately. And his paperback Models — which sounds like a dating manual but is so much more than that — is probably the best self-help book I’ve read.
I used to agree with him that self-improvement is curiously self-undermining:
There’s a paradox with self-improvement and it is this: the ultimate goal of all self-improvement is to reach the point where you no longer feel the need to improve yourself.
The only way to truly achieve one’s potential, to become fully fulfilled, or to become “self-actualized” (whatever the fuck that means), is to, at some point, stop trying to be all of those things. — Mark Manson
The thought is this: the purpose of (self-)improvement is to evolve to that place where you’re no longer preoccupied with becoming better. Yet, as the avid self-help-fan will have experienced, working to self-optimize only seems to drive one away from that satisfied, ‘I’m enough,’ state of mind. As such, there’s something paradoxical about the enterprise.
