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Self-Help
3 Ways to Excel at Self-Improvement
How to turn knowledge into growth with proven strategies.
Posted January 15, 2025 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Have you ever encountered someone who reads a self-improvement book and by the next week, they've fully incorporated it into their life, and are already accruing tremendous benefits from the advice? In contrast, someone else might read the same book, apply nothing, and languish.
Here are three tips to help you experience more benefits from your self-improvement insights.
1. Approach Self-Improvement Like a Software Engineer
You're a software engineer, and your code isn't working. You try to understand why but get stuck. In response, you reduce the system to its simplest part, add error logging, test your simple version, and debug it as necessary. Once you're sure that part is working, you begin adding other components back into your code, repeating the same process. You iterate until you've got fully working code that does everything you need it to do.
People who struggle to benefit from self-improvement advice often lack the patience or mindset to apply this strategic, systematic approach. For engineers, this process is second nature. Iterative improvement, stripping down a system, getting each part working, and building it back up are mental models that engineers naturally apply regularly.
To benefit from self-improvement, focus on getting one part of a system working first—refine and master that before moving on to the next piece. If you're struggling, reduce the part of a system you're trying to debug to a small chunk.
2. Prompt Yourself to Recognize Patterns for Better Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge transfer is the biggest challenge in learning. We fail to apply our insights and solutions to new contexts. This tendency is thought to have an evolutionary basis. If we knew a berry was safe, it would be dangerous for us to assume a slightly different berry was safe. Therefore, we've evolved to have what's termed narrow generalization gradients.
However, research shows that just asking someone to consider if a problem is similar to another problem they already understand (and can solve) improves knowledge transfer.
You may have heard this classic problem: People were tasked with figuring out how to destroy a tumor using radiation. A single, high-intensity beam of radiation would destroy the tumor but also harm surrounding healthy tissue. The tumor problem is solved by using multiple low-intensity beams of radiation aimed from different directions, which concentrate their power on the tumor without damaging the healthy tissue.
When people have been told the answer to the tumor problem, they still have trouble transferring their knowledge to a similar problem. An example: A general wants to attack a fortress but can't send all his troops through a single heavily guarded road without them being easily discovered. The solution is to split the army into smaller groups, sending them down multiple roads to converge on the fortress at the same time. Few people naturally see this solution, but people's success dramatically increases if they know the solution to the tumor problem, and you explicitly ask them if there are links between the two problems.
The takeaway: When you learn a self-improvement principle from a book or blog post, you need to prompt yourself repeatedly and frequently to consider if it's relevant to new problems you need to solve, decisions big and small, and different contexts and situations you're facing in your daily life.
3. Use Custom Instructions with AI Chat Bots to Incorporate Your Insights About Yourself Into Your Day-to-Day Making
To support knowledge transfer, work through decisions and challenges with your favorite AI chat tool. Provide it with custom instructions that tell it to remind you about patterns you're trying to change, and the new patterns you want to practice.
Custom instructions are like super prompts. They're personalized settings you give the AI to help shape how it interacts with you on an ongoing basis. They are different from regular prompts, which are one-time questions you ask the AI during a conversation. Custom instructions are used to influence each specific interaction.
If you're trying to change a pattern or implement self-help advice, tell the AI about those goals in your custom instructions. For example, to stop getting distracted from your big vision, you might set custom instructions like this: "I can be drawn away from my core objectives by new opportunities or by compromising with other people. Make sure I'm not losing sight of my objectives or compromising with others in ways that undermine my goals. If you see any evidence of this in our conversations, please remind me of this pattern, remind me of my goals, and encourage me to stay focused. For reference, my goals are [tell it your goals, big vision]."
You can see a fleshed-out example of how to use custom instructions for self-knowledge transfer in this video clip.
Final Thoughts: Applying Self-Improvement Strategies Effectively
There's lots of great self-help advice out there, both in books and right here at PT. Applying it consistently can be hard, especially if you already feel overwhelmed or like you're struggling. However, using some specific strategies can make you much more successful at it, and ease your stress burden. Try the techniques shared here to better transfer your learning into your life.
