It’s probably been about three to four years since I took self-development seriously. Back in 2002, I maintained a private mini-blog where I’d post daily and reflect on how I accomplished my goals as well as how I used my time. It eventually fell into disuse as summer rolled around and I never picked up the habit again. Curiously the semester after that went very well; perhaps I internalized some of the habits I practiced.
In any case, after receiving word of a sizable new project I have to tackle in the next week and half, I googled for “ajax todo-list” and discovered voo2do. That led me to re-read Joel’s Painless Scheduling; therein I found a link to Joel’s Reddit which led me to find J. Timothy King’s blog (who was kind enough to e-mail me to thank me for linking to his leadership article).
Reading that blog today, led me to read his post on how Practice Makes Perfect Professionals. It hit a chord; I realized how I have fallen into bad habits by simply repeating them — and similarly, how I’ve fostered good habits (and defeated bad ones!) by doing the exact same thing: repeating them.
In any case, in his post, he links to Steve Pavlina’s How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off. Again, something that hit a chord right away — MIT has made me a late-night person (often going to bed at 1 or 2 am or later), which practically usually ended up meaning that I would sleep in later (usually no later than noon). This would cannibalize my entire day.
This semester, I have class on MWF starting at 8 am — this has forced me to get up at the (to MIT at least) early hour of 7:30 am. What I’ve personally noticed is that those days tend to be more productive, even though I have more to do during them. Steve saw this too in his post on How To Become an Early Riser: “On those rare occasions where I did get up early, I noticed that my productivity was almost always higher, not just in the morning but all throughout the day.” While getting up 5 am (as he does) is not practical at MIT (it’s simply too loud on my hall to fall asleep at 10 or 11 pm), this might prove useful for law school when classes all start at — you guessed it — 8 am.
There’s really a treasure trove of good information on his site; I could spend several hours reading it and absorbing it. That wouldn’t be very productive would it? Instead, after reading part of his series on Self-Discipline as well as his article on How to Get From a 7 to a 10 (can I be a better Dominik? yes, of course I can).
This ties in with the principle of kaizen that we just learned about in 15.760. Kaizen is a Japanese word that means continuous improvement, or change for the better. The implication is that the improvements are each small, but there are so many of them that they add up. This also squares nicely with what I’ve read of the Legionaries of Christ’s founder, Father Marcial Maciel’s saying that “Sometimes we may fall, but it doesn’t matter if we fall a thousand times if it is the fight we love and not the fall” (more on that in in this bring-it article by Father Michael Goodyear).
Returning back to Steve Pavlina’s site, things come full circle when he proposes maintaining a time log — precisely what I did (but then stopped doing) in 2002. I’m going to commit to improving myself and will try using this tool once again.
This path of self-improvement (hand in hand with Christ) will give me more freedom, not less. I want to be a better person, to grow wiser and stronger. I don’t want to waste my life away doing actions of little consequence, stuff that won’t matter. As bring-it says, “But true freedom is not ‘freedom from’ but ‘freedom for’. Man is only free when he commits himself to something – until that time he is merely potentially free, a slave to indecision or to his passions which have the upper hand.”
There’s more than a little irony here; I wouldn’t have embarked on this path had I not gotten that extra project due in a week and a half. That project forced me to take a look at where I was, break me out of my complacency and made me take these steps towards becoming a better person.
Here’s to self-improvement, kaizen or whatever you want to call it :)