Self improvement
Today the world faces problems. From the erosion of human rights to the decay of our environment. These problems are complicated; and the thinking that created them is not thinking that is going to allow us to fix them. In my current state I do not have the skills to make a large impact but I can work on myself. I can start taking actions to improve my ability to think strategically and creatively. Cultivating a strong mind which will allow me to solve the problems that my generation and future generations will inevitably face.
Accomplishing any self improvement goals can be done in a few ways. The most common recommendation I hear is to read. Every podcast guest talks about the books they have read, are reading, and like to tell others to read. Another fan favorite is to write. Journaling in the morning is a practice that many great figures from Marcus Arelius to Winston Churchill have done. Apart from reading and writing, which I enjoy, more of the common wisdom is to learn a language or take a class. Nothing else was too appealing to me personally until I came across speaking. Reading, writing, and speaking each have their own unique qualities that can help you on your self improvement journey.
The Corners
When you read, you are consuming the thoughts and ideas of another person. Each and every book is a collection of ideas someone has organized in a specific way. Beyond just learning about the topic, the reader is also learning how an author thinks. A book is often the most well articulated explanation of an author’s thought process. Understanding what the author is saying can be a powerful tool you can use to upgrade your thinking.
Writing, on the other hand, allows us to refine our own thinking. When you keep a thought in your head it is easy to accept it at face value without actually putting it under scrutiny. Assessing the validity of an idea can be difficult unless we sit and review it. Writing gives us the opportunity to assess our beliefs and compare them to the alternatives. The writing process has the added benefit of allowing us take a break from our analysis and come back to it. In fact the process of coming back to an idea is an imperative part of refining your own thoughts. Hemingway once said, “The only real writing is rewriting.”
Speaking has similar benefits to reading and writing with a few unique advantages of its own. Like writing, speaking helps you to clarify your thoughts. Less obvious is that both speaking and reading are ways for us to learn about how others think. When we speak we get real time feedback from the audience. We can observe where in our thought process people agree, disagree, or are confused. Receiving edits on your writing can accomplish the same goal but writing edits are one sided communication which lacks context.
Self Improvement Triad
After working on each of these areas consistently for years, I stumbled across a secret that I don’t hear people talking about. When I first began this process, I would work on each one of these activities in isolation. My reading would consist of books written by great thinkers; my writing would be centered around my day; and speaking would be focused on the prompt that Toastmasters had given me.
One Toastmasters prompt happened to align with a project I was assigned at work. The project was to create educational material about a specific topic, and the Toastmasters prompt was to teach the audience something new. I decided to recycle what I was learning about at work and use it in my Toastmasters speech.
Most speeches I give are about my life experience. I don’t need to read or do research, and any thought organization is easy. The education speech was different though. I ended up reading, writing, and speaking about one topic. I was using a multi-sensory approach to creating a presentation. During that time I didn’t think much of that fact but later I realized that I understood the subject far better than any other topic I had studied in the same amount of time, Importantly, the information I had learned has stuck with me longer than other topics.
What I discovered was that practicing these three activities in conjunction with each other created synergy. Synergy describes the interaction of two or more organisms to produce a combined effect that is greater than the sum of its parts. The best example of this phenomenon is in work. Teams come together and create more value than if each person on the team was to try and produce the same value individually.
Since making this discovery, I align whatever it is I am reading with what I am writing, and eventually what I am going to be speaking about. I refer to this process as the self improvement triad. The self improvement and educational gains I have experienced by taking this approach cannot be understated. I have learned more deeply, retained information longer, and accelerated my growth as a person
Conclusion
There are many ways in which you can work on self improvement. Whatever activities you choose, make sure they align with your self improvement goals. Pursuing activities that have synergy is one of the best ways to accelerate growth. I use reading, writing, and speaking in conjunction to help accomplish that for myself. Working on each practice on its own is effective, but working on all three at the same time creates an incredible synergetic effect accelerating your ascent towards becoming the person you want to be.