Quirkbag Collection #34 – 06.03.26
There’s a line which Jim Rohn shared in his lectures – ‘set a goal to be a millionaire for what it’ll make of you to achieve it.’ You don’t need to be wise to know that he wants you to develop yourself, to become better. In that process, maybe you’ll become a millionaire. I mean, it’s really hard for the average person to simply make a million dollars. It could take decades, if at all. But that struggle to become a better person is not any easier.
As an individual, becoming someone better means turning yourself into a different version of yourself. Someone you currently are not. That’s incredibly hard, notwithstanding all the self-help advice. It takes fundamentally changing your behaviours and mindsets to shift your actions toward that of a better person.
That means a lot of hard work and discomfort. It’s plenty of forcing yourself to do things you would not normally do.
As I navigate this phase of my life, a lot of attention has fallen to the self-development sphere – from exercising to reading and learning skills for my own betterment. It remains extremely hard to tell where you’re headed in terms of self-growth because there’s this cloud of fog that impairs your clarity when you’re in the midst of it all.
Much like that line from Steve Jobs, you cannot connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward. You just have to trust your own growth.
What Is A Better Person?
The struggle to become a better person is a multi-causal problem, but nonetheless (I think) a benign problem to have as far as problems go. (Debt, for instance, seems way worse as a problem.) It implies a willingness to improve both intrinsically (yourself) and extrinsically (for others). Don’t worry, you’re probably a good person already for wanting to be better.
One likely reason is the lack of a clear definition for ‘better person’. I don’t even know what that means. So how do I achieve that?
‘Better’ is such a vague term that you have to define it more tangibly – be fluent in Mandarin, freelance as graphic design from scratch or volunteer twice a week. There are various tools for goal-setting online. Defining your own ‘better’, as simply as possible, helps push yourself towards that end goal – aka that next version of yourself.
So if my ‘better’ means going to the gym twice a week, why does it suck so much to stick to it? There’s still resistance when it comes to doing the thing to make you better. You find it hard to wake up early, you feel too tired to exercise or the weather feels too cold.
There’s infinite excuses to avoid ‘becoming that better person’.
How does that make sense? We should technically want to do the thing, because we want to be that ‘better’ person. Or do we?
The Pursuit of ‘Better’
Chasing self-improvement is not a bug but a feature of simply wanting to grow and explore. Every time we learn something new, see something different and explore something else, we are better because our horizons are broadened. We gain knowledge, experience and even skills from the encounters.
But contrary to passive cumulations, our active pursuit of betterment can prove arduous. Therein lies the struggle.
We struggle – procrastinate, delay, postpone, dread, abhor – to do different things because that is just not who we are. Passive cumulation from general life or formal schooling is beyond our control, we just live through it. But active pursuit requires the voluntary action of taking on extra work, tasks and worries instead of the bare minimum.
So to answer that question on why we find it so hard to do something we should technically want to do, it’s probably because we know we don’t have to do it, we can skip it and continue lingering in our comfort zone until life forces change. If that sounds familiar, it’s what I described as passive cumulation of experience.
You don’t have to exercise.
You don’t have to volunteer.
You don’t have to change…yet
But we would like to.
That’s why those goals loiter in our heads.
“I should go to the gym this week” or “I’ll try meal prepping this weekend”.
The only way to be ‘better’ is to put in the work, actions and behaviours of your desirable self. So how do we bring ourselves to do all the things we need to do to be ‘better’?
Fortunately for us, there’s a whole industry of self-help ready to dish out advice from habits to productivity to memory and more. You just have to pick one method to help you work towards that ‘better’ self.
Am I A Better Self Today?
If becoming a better self were that simple, won’t we all be saints? Considering the news still reports all kinds of debauchery, we’re not all ‘better’ versions of ourselves. And maybe not all of us want to be. We could just embrace the person we currently are. Would that be so bad?
Maybe not. Not until life forces change upon us.
We are, or at least I think we can be, better people today than we used to be simply by virtue of choice. In choosing to learn from our experiences, our struggles and our old problems, we can be better by being kinder to our present self and others who may be going through something similar. (Being kinder to ourselves might be the hardest problem yet.
There’s something reassuring about becoming better: the tasks don’t get easier, the goal of a ‘better’ self is not changing, but you are getting stronger and closer to being that ‘better’ self. Going to the gym is not easier, you’ve become stronger.
When the struggle starts easing, that’s because you likely shifted part of your identity to embrace the habits or tasks done by that ‘better’ self.
But the journey is rough. These tasks compete with our current lifestyle for our finite time and energy. Amid the self-doubt and lack of consistency in our efforts to be better, we face the fact that maybe we just don’t want that “better self” as badly or urgently.
It’s not as important as whatever is the worry of the day.
And that’s normal. That’s why there is the struggle to become better, we fundamentally have to squeeze changes into our lives.
Living With The Struggle
As we grow older, we inevitably grow into ourselves as individuals. We have a firmer identity of who we are. It is also true that as we grow, we continue to struggle because we face new situations, problems and people in life. Perhaps the struggle of becoming a better person never ends because the person we are today is insufficient for our lives in future.
In other words, life forces us to grow, or we’ll never adapt.
Choosing to become a better self is hard because consistency in doing the tasks required to become that version of yourself is immensely difficult. The struggle is to be expected. That’s the process. And sometimes I do wish it were easier to become a better person.
I’ve committed myself to going to the gym at least 4 times a week and the only reason it has become less dreary is the change in my mindset.
I used to see it as an obstacle in my day. It was not part of my life back then; going to the gym was not part of my identity. So I struggled to bring myself there. It always felt weird being that newbie. But now, I enjoy the process of becoming. Not the end goal of having some physique or muscle mass. But the act of going to the gym; the act of completing part of my life’s routine.
Embrace the Mindset
Becoming better feels partly enjoyable once you begin to embrace the process of becoming a better self, the process of growth. Building the new routine is easier with a mindset that does not see tasks as “obstacles”. Embracing this change in your identity and self is what would propel you to sit through the tasks and minimise your struggle.
With Jim Rohn’s advice, the million dollars merely motivates you. To be a millionaire, you have to become a person who earns a million dollars.
You first become the person, then you get the outcome. We struggle from one point to the next, but we make it anyway. Mostly.
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Hi! I’m Zac, the guy behind this slightly off-beat, quirky blog. I’m currently on a quest to find out more about myself, who I am and what life has to offer before Uni starts. This blog is my little secret space where I step out of my comfort zone to share my thoughts and life experiences. I hope you enjoy reading. I do weekly posts. Share them if you like, or not.
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