Personal development series: self study 101

Love yourself, learn yourself, impove yourself

Some of my followers might be wondering why I post blogposts such as: "Understanding Total Daily Energy Expenditure" and similar posts. This post will highlight the philosophy behind all posts like that and demystify my methodology of self improvement. Love yourself, learn yourself, improve yourself, is the core principles behind my personal development strategy. This directs most of what I study and is the focus of my true job which is to become the best person I can be by utilizing the resources I have.

Love yourself

This is the basic principle behind just about everything I do. All of my deliberate behaviors are based around self love. This does not mean I'm a perfect person who does not make mistakes or who does not have behaviors which can be self destructive but the point here is that the overall trend of my behaviors is based around this primary principle. If I love myself then I will want the best life for myself and my behaviors will be a means to achieving that end. If you love yourself then you probably want the best life for yourself and your behaviors should be focused around improving your life not just in the current moment but projected in the future if you should live into the future.

Learn yourself

So you've established that you love yourself and you want to live the best life you can? Well it's of course not going to be that simple. Just loving yourself doesn't mean you'll know yourself. What exactly are you? Well this might take a life time of studying to even answer a basic question such as that. What is life? What exactly is the universe which life is contained in? How did life evolve? What was the big bang and what caused it? Why out of all the statistical possibilities are you here?

Learning yourself is about the pursuit of wisdom. All that you learn is actually about yourself as you're an emergent property of this universe. Whatever caused the big bang also caused you (and us). If you believe in science or in religion they both seek to answer similar questions but science does so in a way which accounts for uncertainty while religion is based on faith.

Wisdom in the scientific realm comes from the results of many experiments. We for example have the Standard Model and Quantum Mechanics. Learning yourself also includes seeking to understand biology, health related topics, anything which can help you to know what you are, what your biology is doing, ways to improve upon it. This learning yourself could be tracking yourself by what is called quantified self, or it could be getting your genome sequenced, or it could be tracking your blood test results, or just tracking how you feel on a daily basis. The more you know the better you can grow.

Improve yourself

If you love yourself and you know yourself then you'll want to grow yourself. Growth by itself isn't good or bad so the question becomes in what way do you want to grow? This is where "improve" has to be defined and there is no agreed upon global definition of a best self. We have the sentiment of the communiy which can provide us with feedback to help us determine if we are improving. For example a body builder knows their form is improving based upon how well they do in a competition on a stage. A person who is in politics can determine they are improving based on how many votes they are able to get (and based on polll data). A doctor can know they are improving based on the outcomes they see.

To track improvements requires utilizing what is known as metrics. Once you learn how to know yourself via learning yourself then you can track your current version of you and compare it to previous and future versions of you. If we are talking about for example body composition then once you know or have a reasonable estimate of what your muscle and fat percentages are then you can know if a certain nutrition plan and workout routine is having the desired impact. In other words you know yourself by knowing your numbers and you improve yourself by determining which behaviors improve your numbers.

Conclusion

Self improvement and personal growth are two of my primary ideals. It's a great challenge to improve as society often promotes regression rather than personal improvement. It is hard to improve because how do we know if we are trending toward becoming a better or worse person over time if we only have social media likes and economic indicators? These social media likes can give people a false impression as to whether or not they are improving and the economic indicators may reward certain behaviors which may or may not be actual improvements in the person.

So how does a person determine if they are improving or not? That is a question I haven't yet answered but we can know that community standards exist. These could be valued by you or not. We also know personal standards exist which is the standard you set for yourself. These personal standards you set for yourself ultimately determine if you're "improving". Improvement is subjective and based on how you want to see yourself and how others see you.