You took some time to revisit why you want to improve something. And then looked at what you want to improve.
If you wrote something down for both of these questions, that’s awesome!
Whatever you wrote isn’t final, doesn’t need to be complete or perfect. As long as it covers off the items that are relevant to you right now, that will be good enough for now. And good enough really is good enough. You can revisit and revise at any time.
What Needs Improving
You could have listed just about anything under what you wanted to improve. You could have listed results or skills or feelings or … (I’ll use … often to keep things open-ended. You can imagine it sits at the end of many lists. I don’t have the time or feel the need to research every sentence, so you could always have your own additions.)
Here are a few thoughts about items of different types that I might put some focus on, but everything is fair game.
- sleep better
- have a more loving romantic relationship
- physical health and fitness in general or to perform a specific activity
- improving effectiveness within a group or organization
- ability to make good career and financial decisions about your future
- be prepared for unexpected adverse effects
- reduce your ecological footprint
- foster inclusiveness, belonging, and contribution of everyone
I will choose examples and case studies that I know something about and/or am familiar with relevant resources. I believe many of the topics will have universal or at least very broad applicability. But of course you can go in whatever direction you need to go.
There are a couple of directions we could go from here. We could get into approaches and techniques about how to improve in the areas you’ve chosen. But I think we’ll come back to that, and first take some time to visit What Does Better Mean? and soon What Do You Care About?
Example
Let’s first think of a sample about thinking about what’s better than something else.
We can think about a spectrum from badness to goodness. First, it’s open-ended. It’s hard to think of something that is perfectly bad or perfectly good, where nothing could be better or worse.
Then within the spectrum we place anything only in comparison to something else. By imagining alternatives we can say that something is better or worse than something else, based on some conscious or unconscious criteria.
For me, a shorter, deeper sleep is better than a longer, shallower sleep.
Let’s look at that statement. Why is it better? I could say it’s because I feel better when I wake up, but it’s helpful to be more precise: I feel more alert, more rested, am more physically coordinated, am less irritable and easier to get along with, and so on.
So if you agree that:
- being more alert, more rested, more physically coordinated, less irritable, and more easy to get along with are
- a) valid criteria about how to measure whether sleep is good, and
- b) a majority of the most important factors to consider
- and you also agree that a shorter deeper sleep produces more of those results for you personally compared with a longer shallower sleep, the majority of the time
then you can probably agree with the original statement.
We could ask more questions about the statement, such as:
- Is it always true? That a longer, shallower sleep is never better
- What do you mean by deeper or shallower? Can it be measured scientifically in a way that aligns with perception?
- Is what you feel by deeper and shallower the same as what I feel? Does it matter?
But for our purposes I think we can leave those aside. What I want to focus on is that there are some criteria that we can identify and define, that we use those criteria to make a comparison between two or more alternatives, and we use that comparison to make a judgment about what is better.
This may not be a familiar way of thinking for many people. It is detailed and precise, structured and logical, and designed to clarify and make visible thinking in a way that can be examined, assessed, and very importantly, shared.
If you aren’t familiar with this type of reasoning (Note 1) and are willing to give it a try, then let’s keep going. I won’t be going to the extent of being philosophically rigorous, but I will encourage more of those features: detail, precision, structure, logic. This isn’t the only type of thinking, but I think it has to be one tool in the toolkit. There is also room for creativity, feelings, perceptions, and subjectivity, but it is called out as such.
Exercise
Think about one of the improvement areas from your list and explore the following questions. Be as detailed and precise as you can be.
1. You said you want to improve in this area. What does being better or worse look like in this field? What are the alternative behaviours or results that you are comparing?
2. What are the criteria that you use to judge?
3. Would different people in different situations agree on those criteria for their own situations?
4. Make a table or list to compare your alternatives using the criteria you identified.
5. If you explained your situation and criteria and how you judged your alternatives, would others understand or agree how you judged your alternatives for yourself?
About Learning
I mentioned doing improvement work a couple of times a week. This was just a guideline. You will have to choose what works for you. The key is to have some time set aside, to schedule it in, to make it a routine, and to do it often enough that you have momentum. You want to choose a frequency that’s achievable so that you will feel successful. On the other hand if you miss one or more scheduled self-study sessions, that’s absolutely okay: don’t beat yourself up, remember this is something you can do for yourself, review where you are in the process and carry on!
Notes
1. If you don’t have experience with formal reasoning, a philosophy course is a great way to get introduced to it. I’ve been watching the lecture videos from a course on the philosophy of death and the afterlife, taught by a professor, Shelly Kagan, at Yale University. It sounds morbid but I think most people would find the topic interesting. He’s a good lecturer, and while it doesn’t give the practice of having to generate arguments in the form of essays, watching the videos can only help improve your reasoning and understanding. Here’s the URL: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEA18FAF1AD9047B0