If we set aside all the advice on what does and doesn’t improve your quality of life… It all comes down to one thing. You can only know what improves your life through experiences and personal experiments. The reason most self-improvement advice is a waste of time? Because it is general. The goal of the person giving advice is to cover the most surface area, even if that advice may or may not work for you.
Real self-improvement advice has to be tested and tailored to you. It has to be personal. It is the only way to avoid optimizing for something that was never meant for you or that goes against your personality. What is this article about? Our personal experiments (methods, activities, lifehacks…) over the last few years. What works, what we manage to stick with, and what we plan to do.
Generic self-improvement… Doesn’t work
The older we get, the more obvious it becomes that self-improvement is a waste of time for most. What we mean is that the real way to get the most out of it is to figure out how to incorporate new variables into your current structure. That might not be true if you’re in your 20s and don’t have a structure yet, so you are free to make whatever big (or small) change you want. But once you have a setup in place, the drastic changes that most self-improvement requires and most people look into... Aren’t realistic. Because they require more than what most can give.
Let’s say you decide to go for something drastic. What is the first obstacle you will deal with? Timeframe. The next one? Your ability to pick up the variables that moved you forward (mostly because there are a lot of them at the same time). What happens when you decide to make a drastic change? Chaos. A few years back, everyone was pushing people to go into monk mode. We are not saying there is anything wrong with that. Especially if you can make it work. But imagine telling someone who spent 80% of their time on their phone to go cold turkey and quit... That's something you might or might not be able to stick with.
We are not saying this is the wrong approach to self-improvement. But we are not fans of this approach either. Our recommendation is to avoid big, drastic changes if you can. A better way to approach self-improvement (personal experiments) is to play with low to medium level (effort) variables you can stack many times without making drastic changes. Yet once you stack 2 or 3 of them in the right order, they compound and become drastic. Those are the ones you can incorporate into your life and keep for years. Yet each has a direct impact on your quality of life.
The Guinea pig approach and designing a life that works
I am a human guinea pig and a professional dilettante. - Tim Ferriss
The only way to achieve your perfect self-improvement state is to maximize happiness and operate at 100% of your energy. It comes down to positioning yourself so that every day you feel ready to work, take on new challenges, or attack things bigger than yourself. It starts with figuring out your perfect day. This is an extreme oversimplification, but the main idea still holds. Those are sort of the requirements.
How do you expect to get the most out of your life if you do not know what is working for you? It would also be dumb not to recognize that nothing in your life is fixed and that things change over time. What worked for you before might not work in the future. That's one of the main reasons this website exists. It is for those tired of conventional methods and unafraid to do what others around them won't.
The next logical conclusion is that only through continuous personal experimentation can you figure out your next step. Not necessarily the next step, but what is worth having in your day-to-day routine… And what is something that might work for others and not for you.
Our perspective here (and on self-improvement) is as simple as it gets. Your daily life needs a good balance of proven frameworks, methods, activities, and things you know will NOT let you down. The ones that work for YOU. Mixed with the new things, variables, and experiences that will allow you to reach the next step. After a certain period of time, they will give you enough data to show you how inefficient they are for you, to the point where you can remove them from your life.
This is the optimal way to change your life without doing something drastic for 3 months and burning out. What you want is a well-proven mix of what works for you and new methods that MIGHT work for you, and you need to test them.
The only way to know if a habit is working or if it is a waste of time
There is no easy answer, and it’s even harder when you are testing multiple things at once. Want to make it extra hard for yourself? Start looking into the data and studies on what you are testing. That approach will lead you down a path of unnecessary optimization and small moves that waste your time.
How do we approach testing things out? MED - minimum effective dose. That means if the smallest effort we put into something produces the expected (or better) results, we stick with it. Next on the list is sticking to one variable (max two) while you test something.
Let’s say you are trying to figure out your diet and how to lose weight. What happens when you change 10 variables, going from snacking all day to intermittent fasting? From 40 grams of protein to 160 grams of protein? From eating only certain types of food? One (max two) experimental variable at a time, no matter how boring it is. Only by isolating it will you know whether it works. The last piece of the puzzle is doing it on a short base cycle… But not too short. That usually comes out to 5-6 weeks (around 40 days), which gives you enough time to figure out what is working and what is a waste of your time.
Our approach is that there are no big commitments without testing first to see how they work for you… Or they don’t. This is what most people don’t consider, yet it plays a huge role. And it’s one of the biggest reasons most people never manage to stick with anything when it comes to self-improvement and changing how they do things.
How we test things:
MED (minimum effective dose) - you want simplicity.
One or max two variables at a time - forget about doing 10 different things at once and expecting that you will be able to figure out where 80% of the results are coming from.
At least 35 - 40 days to see whether something is working for you.
Our 12 months of testing and experimenting
How to get 2 hours of deep work before everyone wakes up
After trying every schedule structure possible, it all came down to 5 am. This is even more true if you are working on multiple projects that are different from each other. Why is 5 am special? It works for us because it gives us enough time and space to do all the creative work we want without distractions. No one texting you. No notifications going off. Peace. It is also impossible to deny that your head feels fresh and ideas click after you wake up. The only requirement is that you don’t let yourself pick up the phone, scroll social media, or do anything else that might fill your head with distractions. Wake up, grab a cup of coffee, work. The difference in your creative work and your ability to create something will be noticeable.
Want to take it to another level and prove to yourself why 5 am is the best time? Go for a walk first thing in the morning. There is a whole new level of beauty you never notice in the place you live. This is on the experiment list because waking up at this hour every day isn't easy. It requires a solid amount of effort and will. But over 2 weeks, you get used to it. It becomes normal. The bigger problem most people reading this will have is setting up their social life around it... That’s another set of problems.
Hotel lobbies are a secret weapon for deep work
It might sound ridiculous if you’ve never tried it… Or if you’ve never listened to old-school info sellers talk about the magic of hotel lobbies.
Hotel lobbies are a game-changer. We wrote about this months ago on Twitter. One of your side quests should be to explore all the hotel lobbies in your city and figure out for yourself why there is enormous power in them. It's an environment with the perfect amount of noise and tranquility, and NO out-of-place characters causing a mess. Not to mention perfect working hours. A productivity chamber is one way to put it. Extra points? Unlimited amounts of caffeine and alcohol (if you are into it), more often than not… Great music playing in the background that makes it easy to work.
We’d even go so far as to say that if you’re in a position to do the work from the hotel lobby, finding a few places you love in the city will be a massive game-changer. To a point, whenever you feel stuck or things don’t work... You want to head to your favorite lobby. Another benefit if you pick the hotel right? You are exposing yourself to an interesting set of characters who have something going on.