Personal Review
In order to get better, you need education.
One of the most powerful and most neglected forms of education is personal experience.
Do you know anyone who makes the same mistakes continually? Is it you?
If we don't review ourselves properly and often, we can repeat an
incredible mountain of small to medium sized mistakes that hamper our performance
in professional, social, and personal life, and are so insidious that we seldom identify them as sources of dissatisfaction.
Poor posture, a failure to cook healthy and satisfying food on a budget, a lack of
fulfilling hobbies or social interaction. These are a few among a host of mistakes
that may separate us from the fully optimized life we seek. The better you that you wish to become.
Personal review, continued and repeated, allows a space for you to bring up these issues
and address them over time.
I want to briefly mention the affect that those small mistakes can have on mental health.
Feeling unfulfilled in any sector of life, from career to spritual life, can cause low-level,
chronic stress and if unresolved, can contribute to anxiety and depression (although not necessarily resulting in a clinical condition). Maybe the scarier truth is that you *will* try to resolve that lack of fulfillment, and if you are not conscious of where it is coming from, that effort could result in wasted energy, or worse, the formation of destructive habits and patterns. Bringing up these issues, week by week, and formulating small, slow solutions to address them is an elegant answer to this problem, and if continued, can help to produce a life where excess effort is minimized, habits are aligned with long-term goals, and effective systems are built up so that you become better without trying much harder than you did before. After all, doing something ineffective is often just as demanding as doing something effective.
When you see someone who's life seems to *just work* -- they seem to achieve the results they want effortlessly -- understand that they have no magic at work pushing toward this enviable state. They have simple solved a massive number of cause-and-effect puzzles, which are the stuff life is made of.
Cause-and-effect is the essential relationship binding actions to consequences, and finding the actions that lead to the consequences you desire brings you closer and closer to that state of elegance and success that we all desire. Of course finding all the relationships needed to create the life you want is a gargantuon task -- if you try to do it all at once. If, however, you devoted one hour each week to that process, you could come closer to that state in one year, than you would after ten years or undirected effort.
To help you on your way, I've included a small template for your weekly review.
Making a habit of doing this review will help you pin-point the things you dislike about your
performance, find the root cause, and begin the process of addressing these problems.
Here are some resources: