Reading & Writing Are The Foundations of Self-Development
A preachy article but bear with me.
Most of what you hear about self-development comes across as wishy-washy, unclear, and pretentious.?
It could be made more accessible to people who haven’t yet reached the 5 AM club, cold showers, or digital-nomad-on-an-Indonesian-beach level of dedication to the process.?
All these can be difficult to resonate with which promotes a distortion?—?that these people are robotic, inhuman, infallible, and with seemingly no time for pleasure. Worst of all, it creates the illusion of overnight success.
But what if self-development is as simple as reading and writing?
I was in the middle of a process of self-development before ever even realising it.?
Dan Koe says that when writing, you should solve your own problems, and document the solution to help others.?
I can only speak for myself. So here’s an imperfect, incomplete way?—?albeit not the only way.
Why should you ‘do the?thing’?
This seems to me to be the ultimate career/life question. A question broad enough to break the back of someone unprepared for it, but loaded with enough potential to excite even James Milner.
Nietzsche’s line: ‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how’, gets bandied around a lot, so I won’t get into it.
But it is true.
The answers came to me in dribs and drabs.
If you can’t answer why, you will suffer. And suffering is hardly in short supply today, where finding meaning and purpose isn’t as clear cut as going to war to defend your country or picking up a pick axe to put food on the table.
It is why for years I actually yearned for something extreme to happen, like a war.
Not for the suffering, but for the overriding sense of purpose that comes with it. I fantasised about being pushed to my physical and mental limits.
Now, my position is that we actually need a war, a call to arms, a purpose.
Jordan Peterson said that life is suffering and his suggested antidote is to take on responsibility in pursuit of a noble aim.
I don’t disagree, but one step before this is that you need to know how to decide what to take responsibility for in the first place.
My answer is to follow your curiosities.
I used to wonder why I was frothing at the mouth looking out from a soulless London high-rise at the thought of climbing lush green trees and swinging from them.
The answer is evolutionary psychology.
Your psyche is evolutionarily designed to hunt, seek, and fend for your survival?—?both physically and mentally.
While we have removed much of the physical labour required of our ancestors, we still have the same brain.
We can meet our physical needs through exercise, but work-wise? These cannot be satisfied by the whims of society, your boss, and your company who, really, really, don’t care. You better have agentic control over your work.
Some have it, some don’t.
I believe that the modern war we need is a mental one.
To figure out how to stimulate the mind the way it needs to be stimulated, one must follow their curiosities and interests.
If you’re on autopilot, and if you’re just a suited monkey in a cubicle going through the motions, it’s unnatural, and you begin to see how it might make you ill.
Being on autopilot too much suggests you have no purpose. And having no purpose makes you ill because it’s an evolutionary need.
I see this firsthand working in an acute mental health ward.
Gaining mastery over your mind is the war you need to fight.
At a most basic, necessary level, this also involves tempering your evolutionarily ingrained negativity bias?—?something we all have.
Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
My self-development journey begins and ends with reading and writing.
It was a conscious decision to follow my curiosities and intuition regardless of the cost financial-wise and even life-wise.
I still don’t know how wise that was, but I’ve invested in a long-term game.
However, following my curiosities has not only led to me developing passions but has led to me trying to improve all aspects of my life without that ever being the original goal.
When getting serious about my curiosities. I ended up choosing and falling for five: mental health, psychology, philosophy, reading, and writing.
This is about the latter two because, for me, everything stems from reading and writing.
Reading.
Wanting to change careers started with picking up a book.
Wanting to write a book started with picking up a book.
Wanting to get better started with picking up a book.
The books I picked up made my interests and goals seem attainable, made me believe I could do it, and, most significantly, motivated and showed me how.
It started with Horrid Henry and Harry Potter in backseat seven-year-old car journeys?—?both me and the car being seven?—?in bed, on the trampoline, in makeshift tents, up trees, in my blissful pre-technological proliferation childhood existence.
This was luxury reading. And that’s a great start.
But later on, I started to read the wrong way. Going through books at pace in order to mark them as ‘complete’ on Goodreads. Going for quantity over quality.
The key is to read for enjoyment and quality.
Make your chosen curiosity a ‘hunt’ to mimic your evolutionarily ingrained drive?—?especially to find quality.
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My desert island books would be ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ by Ocean Vuong, ‘Kitchen Confidential’ by Anthony Bourdain, and ‘Play It as It Lays’ by Joan Didion. I suspect re-reading these three forever, would improve my writing more than reading one hundred different books.
Quality.
This is the crux of the matter: You can substitute in your own curiosity here?—?treat it, as your ancient ancestor did, like a hunt.
Reading, when done properly can mimic the evolutionary ‘hunt’ you need to go on.
I now ‘hunt’ for ideas, throwing away books that don’t resonate?—?unthinkable before?—?but I don’t have the time to waste in the same way a caveman doesn’t wait around for an antelope to stumble across his path.
All of the above is to say that reading is the only way you can live multiple lives.
All of the above is to say that reading is the only way you can build multiple lives through the ideas you receive.
But… reading without writing is like eating without lifting.
Writing.
Writing has done a number of things for me.
Above all, it helped formulate and solidify my thinking, paving the way for real growth to occur.
Writing specifically includes all of the below for me:
‘‘If you learn how to write well then you can think and you can communicate your thoughts, so not only are you deadly strategically, but you become extremely convincing and then you can go and do anything you want and no-one will stop you?—?that’s never told (to young people) and I’ve never really understood why.”?—?Jordan Peterson
Creativity invokes flow states and improves mental?health.
I do my best work cut open.
What we’re really doing here in pinpointing our curiosities is figuring out where we can be creative.
If there was one thing my 24-year-old self felt most in a past life when drowning in a job I didn’t like, it was feeling stifled by having nothing imaginative to do. Administrative, box-ticking tasks do not fill one’s cup.
Mental health nursing provides an awful lot of creativity and agency but it would be a lie to say that it also does not have its fair share of administrative tasks. Hence, I’m keeping this writing thing on the side.
Humans have an innate need for creativity in one form or another.
Having creative pursuits improves mental health. For a long while, I didn’t understand why.
Now I do.
It’s yet another venture into a flow state. Like exercise, like meditation. Treat the creative process like a hunt (find an idea, put your own twist on it, deliver an output, and enjoy the ensuing positive emotions).
I didn’t think I was creative, but I learned through writing that we all are.
For someone else, this could be drawing, singing, or jam-making. Whatever. The point is that all of these get you into flow states. Otherwise, it’s probably not a creative process.
Creativity can also be used as a tool for processing difficult emotions. Ethan Hawke can explain this better than I:
‘Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, right? They have a life to live and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems until their father dies. They go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart. They don’t love you anymore. And all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life. And has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud? And that’s when art’s not a luxury. It’s actually sustenance. We need it.’?—?Ethan Hawke
Writing a poetry chapbook following a break-up, subconsciously and consciously, helped me process it. Two birds. One stone?—?well, three if you count herself.
It helped me to make sense of the engulfing madness.
Furthermore, as writing grew as an interest, I was achieving a lifelong goal of writing a book, any book… four birds dead.
Finally, and most significantly, achieving it provided a confidence-boost, and has started to solidify a sense that I can achieve anything I put my mind to.
This leads me to self-development.
The scope is now broad all of a sudden.
Did you pick up on what I just said??—?‘A sense that I can achieve anything I put my mind to.’
All by following one’s interests.
This is what I mean.
We have to know ourselves. What do you love? And if you get close to what you love, who you are is revealed to you and it expands?—?Ethan Hawke
This expansion is infinite. It’s why we throw around phrases like ‘life is a journey’, and ‘it’s all about the process.’
You’ll never run out of your interests, which will soon become your passions. And with passion, more doors will open and a wider array of opportunities will present themselves.
‘With each problem you solve, the perceived difficulty of life goes down, and your level of mind goes up. The degree of problems you face is a prime indicator of the stage of personal development you are in.
And the degree of problems you can solve is the degree of problems you can solve for another.
Meaning, the more you develop yourself, by taking on an ever-increasing level of challenge, the more experience you gain.’?—?Dan Koe
Self-development is ultimately about solving your problems.
And reading and writing are slowly solving mine.
This is the adventure of your life.
This is a game-changer.
And yet.
I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.?—?Anthony Bourdain
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1 年??I am personally obsessed with reading and writing because they play a crucial role in our personal growth. They open doors to fresh ideas, diverse viewpoints, and various cultures. Moreover, they enable us to better understand our own emotions, connect with others, and gain knowledge from different individuals.