Lay the Foundations

Insecure people often gravitate towards self-improvement as a way to build confidence.

It’s a good strategy, and far healthier than deluding yourself into thinking you’re confident when you’re actually not. But self-improvement isn’t the answer people hope it’ll be.

It won’t be enough to have a perfect body, a brilliant mind, a game-changing talent, or even a mastery of self-love. Self-improvement is only a means to an end, not the end itself. Because we don’t live in an isolated world, where the only impact we have is on ourselves. There’s no such thing as a healthy way to rise above the crowd and stop caring what anyone else thinks. To do so would make you a monster.

No matter how much work you put into yourself, if it’s only benefiting you, it’s not going to lead you to real confidence.

That’s not, however, a reason to give up on self-improvement. Actually it’s the exact opposite. I’ve dedicated the next part of this book to self-improvement because it’s still a vital step in the pursuit of confidence, just not as vital as most people seem to think.

The real reason we should all be improving ourselves is that better people are better for everyone.

The more healthy people we have, the healthier our society is as a whole, and the more knowledge, access, and incentive there is for others to be healthy too.

The more intelligent and creative people we have the faster we all advance, and everyone’s quality of life advances right along with it.

And the more kind and confident people we have, the more we can cooperate and actually enjoy each other’s company, giving people a reason to let go of bad strategies like hate, and leading by example towards a future where people aren’t so afraid of each other.

Adler believed everyone should have an active voice in the future of their nation and of humanity. It’s our responsibility to contribute to the discussion in a way that promotes unity. If we can do this, we all benefit greatly. As Adler puts it, “when its conclaves are peaceful, all our lives are heightened in tone, health and wealth accrues and arts and education flourish; when its conversation is reserved and suspicious, work fails, men starve and children languish.”^{Note 1}

He believed that the worst position you can put yourself in is to feel like you’re holding everyone else back, and becoming a liability for others.^{Note 2} The more people we have living this way, the slower we progress as a whole.

A common mistake people make is that they double down on contributing to others without any self-improvement, focusing so exclusively that they end up neglecting themselves. Over time, they become the type of person who’s always trying to help people but failing miserably because their own lives are such a mess. Their close relationships suffer, their health suffers, and ultimately any positive contribution they’re making gets less and less effective. Insecurity takes over their lives again, and the worst part is they often stop believing that helping others was the right thing to do in the first place.

This is why self-improvement is our greatest weapon against an insecure world. The more we have, the more we can give back. The better we are, the better we can help.

It’s time to dive into the more practical chapters of this book, but now you know why we’re doing it.

It’s not about making you feel better about yourself. That part comes later. It’s about making others feel better because of you.

It’s about being the best person possible, so that you can contribute in the best possible way.

Courage is what will allow you to do this, and to be courageous we need to feel capable. Which is why this part is about all the strategies and skills I’ve used to improve myself over the years.

Some of them I’ve picked up from books and studies by minds far greater than my own. Some of them I picked up the hard way, through trial and error, and those that have proven themselves on the front lines of my own life I’ll pass onto you.

But perhaps the most useful thing you’ll find is something that only you could use. A strategy that is as unique as you are.

Whatever ends up helping you improve, the important thing to remember is that it will ultimately be you, and only you, that made it happen.

Improvement is Movement

No matter what way you slice it, you can’t feel like you’re improving if nothing is changing. You need to feel like you’re moving forward if you want to keep feeling good about yourself.

This is why objects don’t work for boosting confidence. Buying an expensive new car will feel like a giant leap forward in life, but then the movement stops. The car doesn’t change, and neither does your experience driving it. In a scarily quick amount of time, you’ll feel like you need to buy another one, because you’re not moving forward anymore.

If you’re wealthy enough, you might be able to chase the feeling through dozens of cars, becoming a ‘collector’ and regularly topping up that feeling of progress with a new one. But you’ll never escape the creeping insecurity for long. It will always be waiting for you right on the other side of your next purchase. Because the truth is, you’re not actually improving yourself at all. Owning a better collection of things doesn’t make you a better person. Nothing about you is actually changing.

Mo Gawdat learned this lesson the hard way.

Mo is, quite literally, the definition of success. He’s the author of the bestselling book, Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy (2017), and he’s worked for some of the biggest names in tech, including IBM, Microsoft, and Google. Well known for his work on Google’s innovation arm, Google X, he’s a legend within the tech industry, and made himself extremely wealthy in the process.

From the outside, it looked like Mo was living a pretty much perfect life. But he described it quite differently: “Since the day I started working, I have enjoyed a great deal of success, wealth, and recognition. Yet through it all, I was constantly unhappy.”^{Note 3}

Mo openly admits to falling victim to a psychological effect known as hedonic adaptation, where you always return to your default level of happiness despite the good things happening in your life. More money just leads to wanting a more expensive lifestyle, which leads to wanting even more money, and on and on it goes.

One of the things Mo was spending big money on was cars. In his book, he shares how “one evening I went online and with two clicks bought two vintage Rolls-Royces. Why? Because I could. And because I was desperately trying to fill the hole in my soul. You won’t be surprised to hear that when those beautiful classics of English automotive styling arrived at the curb, they didn’t lift my mood one bit.”

Mo now knows that the reason he was obsessed with cars was because they satisfied his ego. Being a collector of rare and expensive cars was a way to cover up the insecurity he felt about his level of success. He always wanted more, so strived to at least appear like he had more than he actually did.

Mo’s book is about all the changes he made to free himself from this way of thinking, and how he became the happy, confident, and successful person he is today. But it’s also about his love for his son, Ali, who died on the operating table after a mistake was made during a routine surgery.

It was Ali’s death that motivated Mo to write his book. He wanted to honour his son, a kind and thoughtful person who made people’s lives better simply by being a part of it.

Mo gave away his fancy cars, and continues to help people all over the world live better and happier lives.

He now knows that using objects is a highly unreliable way to try and improve yourself. It relies exclusively on external circumstances. If you lose the income to fund your collection, it’s all over. You’re back to being the exact same person you were when you started.

He also learned the hardest truth of all. Which is that you never actually cared about the cars in the first place. No one actually likes cars that much, or any material object for that matter, whether it’s your fancy house, your jewellery, your shoes, or even your own private yacht. It was never about the thing itself. You don’t like things, you just like how those things make you feel about yourself.

This is the horrible lie behind consumerism. We buy things we don’t actually like, because they temporarily make us feel better about our lives, but they quickly stop working because they didn’t actually change anything about who we are. So we buy a new thing, and another, and another, and the cycle repeats, and we don’t change, and we definitely don’t end up happy with the person we’ve become, because we’re still the same insecure person we were when we started.

Learning to recognise what will really change you for the better, instead of what just feels like it will, is the first and most important step on your journey of self-improvement. And the best place to look for the right things to change is within the story of you.

Rewrite your Story

In part one of this book, we learned that who we are is really just a story we tell ourselves, strung together with a series of broken memories and pure fantasies, using everyone else around us as a reference for how good the story really is.

So if our sense of self is built on a story that we’ve created, the obvious place to start improving yourself is by changing the story. Or better yet, by recognising what parts of the story need changing in the first place.

So what makes a good story, and what’s making yours a bad one?

The truth about stories is there is only one, and every story you’ve ever heard is nothing more than a retelling of this one simple tale. The original story. And that story is transformation. Before, and after. Who you once were, and who you are now. And this transformation doesn’t happen on its own. It needs a catalyst, an event, object, or person to set it off. Something to shake things up and force you to be something more, or someone new.

Let’s start with an easy example. Once upon a time there was a little lion cub who was pretty entitled because he was a prince and nearly got himself and his friends killed with his arrogance. Then his father was brutally murdered, and he ran away from his responsibilities, until finally confronting them in an epic showdown with his father’s murderer. A classic story of before and after, entitled little prince to wise ruler of Pride Rock, the transformation of a Lion King, and one of the most loved children’s movies of all time.

Too easy? I agree. How about we go a little further back to one of the greatest stories ever told in the most popular book ever written. A man wants to change the world for the better and he starts teaching people about love, forgiveness, and his father, the almighty God. Then one day he is brutally murdered by people who disagree with him. But three days later he rises from the dead, and becomes a symbol of one of the world’s largest religions for thousands of years. Before a mere man, now an extension of God himself. Transformation at its most extreme perhaps, but a powerful story.

A little too supernatural? Okay try this one on for size. There once was a man who built a company named after a popular fruit but was forced to resign and the company was now going bankrupt. He spent some time building an animation company instead and learnt how to tell stories, then came back to his original company and turned it into one of the most profitable tech companies of all time, becoming an icon of the business world in the process. Before, just another tech founder struggling to get a good product off the ground. After, a revolutionary CEO, who wove Apple products into the story of people’s lives in ways that had never been done before.

This simple pattern is everywhere, in every book, movie, myth, and icon that has ever existed.

So if every good story ever told is about transformation, then it makes sense that yours should be too.

If your story isn’t changing, it’s not really a story, and if who you are isn’t changing, it’s definitely not a good story. And the more you try to stay the same, the more threatened you’ll be by the challenges life throws at you. Because your life will change whether you want it to or not, and if you aren’t the one deciding how it should change, then you’ll feel like you’re being forced to live a life you didn’t choose, and become someone you don’t want to be.

So, if a good life is all about transformation, then surely all we need to do is add that catalyst into our lives. We can just set ourselves some goals, and get to work on achieving them right?

Seems like the perfect solution, just go and achieve all your goals, transform your life from the person you are now to the person you’ve always wanted to be, and you’ll be confident and happy and live the life of your dreams. My work here is done…

Except of course, for the annoying reality that most of us struggle to make progress on our goals, change them regularly, and are starting to believe motivation is just a myth made up by marketers to sell us activewear.

If this sounds familiar, it’s likely you’re making one very common mistake.

You’re picking goals you want to achieve.

Career success, money in the bank, dream houses, perfect bodies, loving families, fame, recognition, peace of mind, happiness… They’re all achievable. They’re things we can have. And this is why most of us will never actually get them.

Because sooner or later, no matter how much you might want something, the idea alone won’t be enough to keep you motivated. You won’t be able to stay positive about a dream you haven’t been able to achieve for years on end. It’s simply too far away. It takes too much time and energy. We’re only human, we need something here and now to keep us moving forward.

Which is why we need to change the way we think about our goals.

Let’s play a little game. What would happen if we stopped trying to achieve things, and started trying to become things instead?

Instead of wanting lots of money, what if your goal was to become valuable?

Instead of wanting to write a book, what if your goal was to become a great writer?

Instead of wanting the perfect relationship, what if your goal was to become someone worthy of being in one?

How much of a difference would this make?

The first goal is all about the end result, but the other is about the process. It’s about developing a skill or bettering yourself.

The problem with the first goal is that it’s only possible in the future, at some defining moment we think will sustain us. But the second goal is achievable every single day. Forever.

To achieve your goal of having a perfect body, you have to wait until the end result, after months or even years of hard work, assuming you don’t give up first, which most of us do. But if your goal is to become fitter, you achieve it every single time you exercise and eat right. You’re rewarded daily, and will continue to be indefinitely. There is no ‘end result’ for these kinds of goals, which is what makes them so much better for us.

Achieving a goal like wealth, status, or happiness is what everyone thinks they want, but it’s not. These things are actually just a byproduct of what we actually want. Which is to have something worth living for.

Adler understood that we’re all looking for a perfect ending, desperately trying to put ourselves in “a position in which a feeling of security has been achieved, a feeling that all the difficulties of life have been overcome and that we have emerged finally, in relation to the whole situation around us, safe and victorious.”^{Note 4}

The old saying that life is about the journey, not the destination, is very true. It just fails to highlight the key concept. The journey is the destination. The goal is to find a path you never want to stop walking, because to reach the end will feel like you’ve stopped living.

Think of your goals. Are they about achieving something in the future? Can you see yourself standing there, having finally reached the level of wealth, attractiveness, or connection you’ve always wanted?

If so, I’ve got some bad news for you, reaching this ‘moment’ is unlikely to ever happen, not unless you make it a by-product of your new goal. A goal that’s reachable in small doses every single day. A goal about becoming more than what you currently are. A goal that’s controllable, attainable, and most importantly, endless. A goal that focuses on transformation.

If your story depends on achieving a particular result, then it’s much too fragile and easy to threaten. But it doesn’t have to end a certain way for it to be worthwhile. Keep it loose, and be open to lots of different outcomes.

We all like to think there’s a finish-line out there somewhere, that a day will come when we’ve achieved all we want to achieve and can just cruise along happily for the rest of our lives. But I promise you, there is nothing worthwhile waiting for you there.

If everything you’ve ever wanted is already behind you, why keep going at all?

Most of us will never achieve our goals, and those that do will get to the finish-line only to discover that there’s nothing important on the other side.

But for those lucky few, the people who understand that life is about moving forward and becoming more today than you were yesterday. They’re the ones that’ll find a lasting purpose, a consistent confidence, and a story worth living.

Choose a Direction

You can’t live every possible story. The more you try to ‘have it all’ the more messy and pointless your story becomes. You have to make choices about what you want to experience and what you don’t.

I was a kid in the 90s, and Pokémon cards were our currency.

Groups of kids would be gathered all over the playground making trades, showing off their collections, or staring longingly at their favourite cards in the hands of others. The whole school was obsessed for a few years straight. I stayed obsessed for quite a while longer.

The first cards I got were given to me by a friend who had way too many anyway. If Pokémon cards were our currency, I started off completely broke.

Other kids got their parents to buy them piles of cards, but I had to do chores around the house for pocket money so I could buy just a few.

I was so far behind some of my friends it would keep me up at night.

But by the end of that first year of poke-mania, I would have one of the biggest collections filled with all my favourite cards, thanks to one simple strategy.

I was good at making people trade with me.

I learned that people would trade for the cards they liked the most, not the ones that were the most valuable or rare. We all had emotional attachments to different cards, and that was the most important thing to us when trading. If I wanted a particular card from someone, all I had to do was find out which card they liked more, and that would be easier for me to get my hands on (something less valuable). Then I’d go out and track that card down, trade for it, usually by offering something a little more valuable since I knew I would be getting a really good deal once I traded with the original kid. And just like that, my collection turned from a handful of garbage to a rare collection of all my favourite cards.

And as trivial as Pokémon card collecting is, there’s a really valuable lesson in all this.

If everyone in my school wanted the exact same cards, there is no way in hell I would’ve been able to trade my way up like that. It only worked because we all had a different idea of what the best collection was. We all wanted different things.

I wasn’t trying to copy someone else’s collection, I was trying to build my own. Something uniquely mine.

For all you 90s kids out there, just to really land this point, I got my Charizard by trading one of my friends with an Alakazam. To me, that was like trading my regular house for a mansion. I couldn’t believe my luck. But hey, we all want what we want.

Okay, enough with the Pokémon, let’s get back to how this is all relevant to you, right now, in your own life that is as uniquely yours as mine is to me.

Your story is like a collection. It has many different pieces to it that change over time. You are the exact same way. A collection of traits, habits and behaviours that also change with time.

The goal is to collect all the best pieces possible. To want every single thing about your life and yourself.

As you can imagine, this is extremely hard to achieve, and most people never get there. But that’s because most people are playing the wrong game.

They’re trying to copy other people’s collections, instead of building their own.

This means you’re putting yourself in direct competition with that person. You want what they have, and would be willing to trade what you have to get it.

No two stories are the same, and they never will be, no matter how hard you try. So don’t waste your time trying to make your story look like someone else’s. The more unique you make yours, the stronger it’ll be.

Insecurity will convince you to only go after the things that everyone else already has. And when you fail to get it, you’ll end up with an attitude that some people are just “gifted”, “lucky”, “talented”, or born better off than you in every way.

Insecurity makes you overvalue what other people want, instead of focusing on what you want.

All it takes is having the confidence to decide for yourself.

Wanting Things 101

Let me just start off by saying this has absolutely nothing to do with being grateful and learning to accept your lot in life or any of those other self-help strategies that have never ever worked.

This is about building something that is yours, and no one else’s. This is about becoming someone with a unique and genuine story. This is the secret to wanting to be you, and only you.

We’re looking around at everyone else and thinking ‘I want what that person has, and that person, and that one.’ Instead, we should be looking around thinking ‘what can I have that nobody else has.’

The main reason we admire other people in the first place is because they’ve managed to become someone that stands out from the crowd, someone who is successfully different. Yet instead of learning from their example, we try to copy them. We say things like ‘I want to be an actor like Robin Williams’ but he’s as successful as he is precisely because there is no one else like him.

We fool ourselves into thinking that if we could just be more like them, we could have a life like theirs too.

And this has never, ever worked.

There’s only one way to live a life you love, and wouldn’t trade for the world. And that is to create one that is entirely your own.

We think that following somebody else’s path is the easier way. Since they’ve already walked it, it must be easier to walk ourselves right?

Walking your own path is hard, there’s no doubt about it. But walking someone else’s is impossible. You could do absolutely everything they did, exactly as they did it, and still end up with a completely different result. Because you are not them.

I’ve always wanted to be an author. To write bestselling books and live a life of peaceful bliss. But that’s where my dream stopped. I didn’t know what kind of writer I wanted to be, I didn’t know how I was going to get there, or what I could say that anyone would care to hear. All I knew was that the life of successful authors looked pretty sweet, and that I should copy it.

As you can imagine, that dream went nowhere, and though I never fully gave up on it, I made little progress.

My mistake was basing my dream on what I’d seen others doing successfully. I wasn’t thinking about finding my own way forward.

Finding your own way is hard, but it’s much easier than many of us realise.

Think about your strengths, and things you enjoy. Think about your interests, and the things you care about most. Then think about how you can combine them into something no one else has thought of yet, and that only you can do.

For me, that meant drawing on my life-long struggle with confidence, my writing, and everything I’d learned building communities in Co-living, something that gave me a unique perspective on how we define ourselves by using the people around us as a reference. And just like that, I’d written a book that was different to anything I’d read before.

We can’t copy someone else’s story. We have to create one for ourselves.

That’s the path to real self-improvement.

It scares us because we think that if nobody else has it, it can’t be worth having. This is the single most destructive attitude anyone can let themselves have. It will keep you chasing after other people’s successes for the rest of your life.

Wanting the right things is hard, and we all suffer from the bad choices we make due to miswanting, a mental flaw that makes us exaggerate how happy something will make us in the future.^{Note 5} We tend to believe that the more exciting something is at the beginning, the more likely it’ll make us happy in the long-term. So buying a Ferrari beats joining a social club for car enthusiasts, winning the lottery beats starting a new career, and dating emotionally unavailable people beats dating someone “normal” that seems a bit boring.

And of course every single one of these is wrong. What makes us happy in the long term are things that keep their attention value, things that don’t remain the same and instead, offer something to keep coming back to.

You can get bored of driving a nice car, but joining a group of car enthusiasts opens the door to endless experiences and relationships. You can lose your lottery winnings in the span of a few years, and people regularly do, but pursuing a career you love will keep you moving forward for decades, if you ever reach a ceiling at all. And I shouldn’t even have to say it, but dating someone emotionally unavailable is a bad idea.

Learning how to want things that will actually make you happy is a huge step in the right direction.

Inspiration vs Imitation

I talk a lot about the dangers of copying other people in this book. It’ll become painfully clear (if it hasn’t already), that I believe it’s the single biggest mistake any of us can make in life. So it deserves a deeper explanation.

When I talk about copying, what I mean is trying to imitate someone else, trying to walk, talk, act, react, and think, exactly the same way they do.

This sort of imitation is very useful for basic skills. In fact, it’s how we learn pretty much everything as a child. We watch other people doing something we can’t do, and then try to do it the exact same way.

As Albert Bandura put it in his Social Learning Theory, ‘learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do.’^{Note 6} Using trial and error alone to learn new things is slow and reckless when you can just copy from someone who already knows what they’re doing.

Imitation is effective and there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just a beginner level tool. When you’re doing something for the very first time, it’s normal to dust off this beginner’s trick and directly imitate someone who knows what they’re doing.

The problem is that many people never get taught more advanced ways to learn. And by the time they’ve reached adulthood they aren’t new to life anymore and shouldn’t be using beginner’s tools. But when imitation is all you know, then that’s what you’re going to keep doing.

Bandura’s famous Bobo doll experiments scared parents all over the world when it showed us just how easy it is for children to use imitation to learn new behaviours.

A Bobo doll is inflatable and about the same size as a child. It’s weighted at the base, so if you knock it over it will spring back up again, ready to take another hit. Basically a child-friendly punching bag.

Bandura got a group of preschoolers and split them into groups. Group 1 watched as adults beat the living hell out of the Bobo doll, Group 2 watched them play peacefully with it, and Group 3 saw neither. Then Bandura let each child play alone with the doll.

I think you can guess what happened. Those poor inflatable bastards. The kids that saw the adults abuse them went straight in and did the same.

We’ve been learning through imitation since before we even knew what the word learning meant. But this is the clearest sign of all that imitation is for beginners. If a toddler is using it effectively, that’s probably a sign to find something a little more advanced.

So for anyone that needs it, let’s talk about the advanced level tool that should replace all of your imitating, and that will change your life for the better in every way imaginable.

That tool is inspiration.

It’s the more mature and complex version of imitation. It has all of the same strengths and none of the weaknesses. It opens the door to the one thing that imitating never could. Inspiration is the building block of creativity. Without it, we’d never make anything new.

What sets inspiration apart from imitation is that it doesn’t care about being exactly the same. Or even remotely the same.

Where imitation is watching others and copying exactly, inspiration is seeing others and applying only what’s useful. You can be inspired by someone doing something completely different to what you’re trying to achieve, because one single element of their process will work perfectly with your own.

Inspiration is a collection of all the best things you’ve learned from others to help you become who you want to be, whereas imitation is trying to copy someone else’s collection.

Inspiration will make you unique and confident. Imitation will make you shallow and insecure.

At some point, we all have to outgrow our beginner tools and become better at learning. Making this transition between imitating others and being inspired by them is the mark of maturity in adults. Only those that have passed this step are able to create unique lives and bring new ideas into the world, ones that will hopefully inspire others to reach this level as well.

But being unique comes with its own set of challenges, and the one that trips the most people up is trying to take the easy way out.

The Different Ways of Being Unique

There are many ways a person can make themselves unique, and stand out from the crowd. But for every good way, there are a dozen terrible ways that will end up doing you more harm than good.

So how do you know the right way to do it?

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to tell.

Like pretty much everything in life, “uniqueness” is on a spectrum. One end is shallow, and the other deep.

Shallow uniqueness is anything that people can copy easily. These are things like fashion, attitude, possessions, cheap experiences, and physical appearance.

People put a great deal of time and effort into looking, sounding, and behaving in unique ways. But everything that makes that person different is right there on the surface. It is shallow, and without too much effort someone else could copy their exact style instantly. This is how trends are born.

Deep uniqueness on the other hand, are the things that only you can do. All of the great achievers, creators, thinkers, designers, and performers have reached this deeper end of the spectrum.

Robin Williams is a great example. His free-form comedy style was so unique that he was literally one of a kind. He inspired a new generation of comedians to be more liberated with their own style, including the legendary Jim Carrey, but no one has ever come close to actually copying what Robin did. It’s just not possible.

To become this sort of deeply unique person yourself, you need to let go of the idea that you can do what everyone else is doing and still stand out. You need to focus on the things that interest you and follow those interests as far as they possibly go. Then you need to combine your knowledge and skills in a unique way.

This makes you almost impossible to copy. No one can just wake up one day and decide to do what you do. It would take them years to catch up, and even if they followed the exact same path you took, there’s very little chance they would end up the same as you. Copying doesn’t work that way. Our natural differences end up playing a bigger role than we think. Which is why it’s pointless trying to be anyone else but you.

The most important thing you can be doing to improve yourself is developing your deeply unique qualities.

Do you have an interest, passion, or hobby that not many other people are into? Good, keep pursuing it as far as it can take you.

Do you have any established skills, like athleticism, communicating, or problem solving? Good, work on them until they’re as honed as possible.

Do you care deeply about something, and want to make a difference? Good, act on that emotion and get involved any way you can.

Going after the things you like, are good at, and genuinely care about, is how a person becomes a deeply unique individual. The type of person others will try to copy, or simply wish they could trade places with.

If you’re sitting there right now panicking because you can’t think of things you like, are good at, and care about, don’t worry, this isn’t just you, and it’s actually a good place to start.

You get to take things from the very beginning, and go through the exploration phase first.

The only way to develop an interest in something is to try it.

The only way to find out if you’re good at something is to do it.

The only way to know if you truly care about something is to experience it.

The exploration phase is the most important and enjoyable part of becoming someone deeply unique. If you need to spend some time experimenting with lots of different things, then go for it.

Some people figure out what path to follow early on in life. Others only figure it out towards the end. But the timing isn’t important. There’s only one thing that should scare you, and that’s never figuring it out at all.

Dangers in the Deep

It would be a mistake to spend this entire chapter encouraging you to pursue your dreams without giving you a word of warning about the risk that always comes with self-improvement.

You should never underestimate the impact of goal setting.

When we decide what we want out of life and really mean it, we’re directly impacting our future happiness. In a large scale study of around 12,000 people that ran for over 20 years,^{Note 7} the people who scored lowest, who were the most unhappy, had set themselves difficult goals and failed to reach them. And this wasn’t just financial goals. The goal with the lowest life satisfaction score was “becoming accomplished in a performing art”.

I’m not saying this to put you off dreaming big, but it’s a reminder of what’s at stake. We aren’t playing a harmless game when we set goals for ourselves, and I believe any advice you get about “shooting for the moon” should come with a clear warning sign.

Knowing what you want in life is the first step to getting it. But going after what you want takes courage, and for good reason.

It’s hard to know what you want, but it’s much harder to know it and never get it.

That’s why going after it is a decision we all must make. So consider yourself informed.

It’s been a long chapter spent laying the foundations for self-improvement. Knowing you need to change, and choosing what direction to go in is the most important step and the one most people fail to take.

If you can overcome this first hurdle, and be brave enough to make a choice about who you want to be, then congratulations, you’ve already made it further than many people ever will.

What comes next might be easier for you, or it might be much harder. It’ll depend on whether you have a few key personality traits, like commitment, resilience and discipline. A healthy dose of optimism probably wouldn’t hurt either.

But don’t worry if you don’t have any of those. The only one that came naturally to me was the last one.

Like all things in life, they can be learned.