Self-improvement at what cost?
My thoughts after reading this article about hustle culture:
For a long time, I wanted to get better and improve at my hobbies, at my work, and in general as a person. My references to find out how where either self-help books or YouTube videos.
Although this shouldn't be understood as a generalization, but most of those books and videos promote the notion of getting better via constant hardworking, optimizing, and even denying other aspects of life with the promise to "be a complete different person in 6 months".
A few times I fell for such promises. Sadly!! I thought this is the price of improvement. If I want to go further in my life, I need to pay the price.
I didn't see the point that real life has more aspects that just only "getting good" at X or Y. It is more complex and more unpredictable. Also I overestimated my abilities (or better to say I wanted to belive so).
Still I want to improve and get better at a few different things. I want to learn about new topics. But there is a big difference: Now I accept that I am a pretty normal person with normal abilities. I make mistakes. There are days or even weeks that I have less energy. I need to take a break some times. But this doesn't mean that I won't make it.