Self-help isn’t selfish. It’s a gift for generations to come
Hi there,
Sometimes you come across something that completely changes your perspective. This tweet by Tim Urban is a good example. I first saw it last December and still think of it often:
When parents raise a child, they install elements of their psyche in them. When one of those elements is damaged, the damage is usually passed on. So self-improvement isn’t selfish—it’s repairing the “family psyche,” which improves the lives of all the generations downstream.
He goes on:
It’s easy to be resentful of our parents’ flaws—but it’s good to consider their own starting point. If they handed you a healthier psyche than they were handed by their parents, they did their job. And your job is to hand an even healthier psyche to your kids.
Of course this doesn’t just apply to your own kids, but to nieces and nephews, neighbors, students. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and from that perspective I see this as one big beautiful, collective job: working on ourselves to the benefit of the next generation.
Another quote that gets me thinking is this one from CS Lewis: “Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature…. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”
Lewis made me realize that the way I behave isn’t permanent or fixed or “just the way I am.” That’s too static. We’re all in continual motion. The question is: Which way are you headed?
This is an invitation to do that work on yourself. Luckily, it doesn’t have to all go perfectly from the start. James Clear talks in his book Atomic Habits about incremental change, the power of the 1% effect:
If you can get just 1% better at something each day, starting this week, you’ll be 6 times better by Christmas. And a whopping 37 times better by this time next year. Turns out little improvements that you hardly notice from day to day, grow into something BIG.
What will you do a little better today?
Have a good week,
Rick
produced by the language girl