SOLVED with Mark Manson - The Self-Improvement Paradox: When Trying to Get Better Feels Worse

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

What do you do when trying to improve your life makes you feel worse? What if trying to be better comes across as ‘try-hard’? What if setting more goals is just your way of avoiding your own bullshit? This is the topic of discussion in today’s episode, “The Self-Improvement Paradox”—or in other words, why sometimes trying to be better makes you feel worse. It turns out improving yourself is nuanced and complicated. Who would have thought? Check it out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction. So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose.com. We all want to get better in life, but what if

trying to get better actually makes us feel worse? The topic of today's episode is an interesting one, and it's actually brought up by you, the listeners. We sourced questions from you all, and we picked up a few that all fell under a similar theme. What do you do when trying to improve? your life makes you feel worse. In the past, I've written about this concept, and I call it the self-improvement paradox, and it shows up in all sorts of different situations. Our first reader question is going to ask about situations where we feel try hard, or where the harder we try to do something, the worse at it we seem to get. The next question dives into how people use goal setting as a way to maybe avoid their problems rather than actually solve their problems. And the last question

comes at me a little bit and challenges my take on self-esteem and how I present it in the subtle art of not giving a fuck. And I hate to say it, Drew, but I think this reader has a point. I think I might have been wrong about something. I know that's never happened before in the history of my career, but today might be the first time. Reminder to you all, if you want to submit questions, go to markmanson.comnet slash questions, send in an audio or short video of your question. And if it's good enough if Drew deems it worthy of my attention, we might just answer it on a podcast. So, let's get into it. Wait, are you allowed to say fuck in your podcast intro? Oh, fuck. I just did. This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson.

All right, the first question comes from a listener named James, and he is concerned about being tryhard. Oh, hi, Mark. So my question to you and the pod has to do with the topic of self-improvement. A big thing I see holding people back from improving themselves, for example, in the arena of social skills, is this belief that doing so is try hard. Like, by deciding to improve themselves, they're admitting defeat, as if they're not good enough as they are. So what do you say to the people who see conscious self-improvement as an admission of personal inadequacy? Like, what's the reframe here? Thanks. This is a really good question, Drew, because as I've noted before, especially with the backwards law stuff, there does seem to be a subgenre of personal development that the harder you try at it, seemingly the worse you get.

Where I've identified that this tends to happen is around social or emotional issues. You know, if you're trying to be liked by a bunch of people, that's going to cause you to behave in ways that makes you less likable. If you're trying to be happy all the time, you're going to think and be preoccupied in such ways that you are less likely to be happy all the time. And so I do think this is a legitimate concern, although the sense I get from the way James phrases it is that the core issue here is actually a lot of times ego, right? If we're constantly worried about coming across as somebody who is desperate to be good at something or admitting that they're bad at something, we're essentially going to just prevent ourselves from changing in the first place. I mean, this kind of comes back to personal development 101, which is the number one reason

that people don't ultimately change or grow is because their ego prevents them from admitting that they need to change and grow. And I think that ego stems from a preoccupation. of how they may appear to others or admitting that they're fallible or flawed or have a problem in the first place. Yeah, you see this in a lot of different areas. Especially, like, I think you've noted before, you know, when you were giving dating advice to men and stuff like that, like, oh, God, if you would admit that you were terrible

with women, you couldn't get any man to admit that, right? That'd be an interesting experiment, actually. It's just have dudes go into a bar and be like, I'm terrible with girls. What's your name? See how that turns out. There's worse pickup lines. Yeah, there are worse pickup lines, that's for sure. But yeah, I think a lot of the resistance that people have is around social stigma.

You know, I know that I run into this a lot with men in therapy. You know, a lot of men don't like to admit that they go to therapy or that they want to go to therapy. I know that I went to therapy throughout much of my 20s and I didn't really tell anybody about it. I think I wrote an article about it at one point, but everybody in my personal life, there was like not a peep. It was lip sealed. So I understand there is this weird resistance to trying to improve certain areas of your life, your dating life, your social skills, your sex life. It's taboo.

There's a weird social judgment that can be attached with it. Separate from that, I think there's also a backwards law issue, which is that if you try to control the outcome too much of a social or emotional problem, you actually remove yourself from it. Paradoxically, sometimes the best way to improve at something is to stop trying to improve at it, right? It's like, if you stop trying to be happy, then that's actually when you become happy. If you stop trying to make somebody like you, that's actually when they start liking you. And I think it's just, it's useful to be aware of those contexts and try to be aware of when you're being quote unquote try hard. But also don't let the stigma of being try hard at something.

and stop you from trying. Yeah, that was actually one thing I was going to ask you about was how do you think this applies your idea of going from bad to okay and okay to great. Is there a time and a place to be try hard and to experiment? Like, say you are somebody who's just terrible in social situations and you want to improve that. And so you go out and you try new conversation topics or styles of humor or you talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to. That's going to come off as try hard and it's probably going to

suck and be painful to some extent, this kind of pain period you've talked about before, but you're also going to learn a lot if you take the right attitude towards it. So do you think there are situations in which being try hard is okay? I think it is, it's definitely better than doing nothing at all. And I do think there are situations where you kind of have to go through a try hard phase to learn how to stop being try hard. There's this popular two by two grid where it says any skill that you want to develop, you start at unconscious uncompetence. Basically, you're bad at it and you don't even realize how bad at it you are. Step two is conscious incompetence, which is you start to understand all the ways you're bad

at something. Step three is conscious competence, which is you get good at it, but you still have to like really think about it and focus on it. And then step four is unconscious competence. And I think in particular, when it comes to like social skills or social graces, people just kind of expect you to be at step four all the time. And if you're not at step four, if you're not a naturally charismatic and social person, you need to go through that painful process of like, okay, being bad at it, but being conscious of what you're working on. And then once you do that

for a while, you can kind of figure out where you're trying too hard or where you're coming on too strong, maybe you're being needy, looking for reactions from people. You can back off a little bit. Eventually, you find that right balance and you're in conscious competence. You have good social skills, but it still takes a lot of effort and focus, which can still be a little bit try hard. But then from there, you move into unconscious competence. So it's, I think in a lot of context, being try hard is just a necessary step to not being terrible at something. Like, I'd rather be try hard than just not try at all. Ah, okay. Well, what is it between the, like, the social and emotional things that we try to improve and there's like a stigma around that versus other things

say you're going to build a business or get in shape or whatever. People don't judge you so much for that. What is it in particular do you think that is the difference between those two and the stigma related to them? It's a really good question. The only thing that comes to mind is that it is things that are more emotional in nature, we tend to judge harsher. So like let's say I decide to sell a bunch of t-shirts or something and nobody buys them. Nobody really cares. So nobody's going to be like, oh, man, Mark's so try-hard. It's like, whatever, doesn't matter.

Whereas if I come on here one day and just make a complete ass out of myself, let's say I just, there's a, we have a 45-minute podcast episode that is literally just nothing but me begging to be liked and sobbing into the microphone and crying about how nobody appreciates me. Stay tuned, everybody. Yeah, right. Next time on the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast. The emotional nature of that is jarring. It makes people uncomfortable. And I think people, anything that makes people emotionally uncomfortable, they tend to judge much more harshly. And so if we're interacting with somebody who is extremely insecure and being driven by that insecurity, it makes us feel that insecurity a little bit. And we want to get away from that.

Okay, yeah, and possibly two spotlights our own insecurities as well. So, yeah. I think this is also a reason why insecure people tend to attract each other, right? So it's like the only person that a tryhard insecure person is going to appeal to is another tryhard insecure person. And they're going to be like, oh, my God, we're like, we're soulmates. And then that's just how relationships go wrong. James also gets extra credit for being the first one to reference the room.

He started out with the, oh, hi, Mark. I don't know if you caught that. The what? The what? The movie The Room. You know the Room, don't you? Do you not know the movie The Room? I don't know, man.

Do you not know? It's considered to be one of the worst movies ever made. Oh, hi, Mark. Are you serious? You don't know the Room? I, you know what? This is like, this is like the third or fourth time somebody has tried to bring up this reference with me.

every single time they are just as disappointed as you are right now. Oh, man, that is disappointing. Oh. Maybe that's my homework this week, because I need to go watch the room and finally understand this reference that people keep trying to foist upon me. It's so bad. You would love it. You're being try hard right now, Drew.

I don't get the reference. All right. It's reaching. All right. We'll just go with it. We've got a great juxtaposition of questions here. James's question is very representative of people who are like, afraid to try to improve themselves.

They probably err too far on the side of complacency. The next question comes from Abby, and she asked the flip side of that, where is there such a thing as trying too hard to improve yourself? So let's listen to that. If I was to ask you one question, it would be this. Where is the middle ground between accepting that you're fucked up and also not being okay with fear convincing you to be comfortable? because to me, it seems like this weird teeter-totter between the two.

Where is the middle ground? Where do I continue to grow, but also still challenge myself and then also calm down and enjoy the present? Like, it's really, sometimes really infuriating for someone like me who's very goal-driven and wants to constantly hit new goals to be okay with all of it. So what is the answer? All right, Mark, can I tack my question in? Go for it.

I have an example. I tend to be pretty hard on myself. And I judge myself, especially for things like not following through on things, quitting too early, giving up too early, that sort of thing. I use that to kind of push myself, but it can also be very damaging, obviously, too. But recently, and I kind of stopped and I thought, wait a second, is that actually true? Do I not follow through all the time? do I give up too early?

Has that actually been true? Can I find examples where this hasn't been true? I did find some solid examples in my life where that was actually true and it refuted this whole idea of me not being able to follow through on things. And so, first of all, you know, I feel like I found that balance. So do you think there is like a balance you have to find between this? But second, too, do you think that all of those years of me feeling inadequate and using that as motivation to go out and accomplish all of these?

things. Do you think that was, I don't know, necessary or is there a better way to go about that? Or I don't know. How do you see that? I definitely think there's a better way to go about it. I, you know, I think what Abby is asking and kind of what you're asking as well is when you're constantly driving yourself to do something, where is there room for self-acceptance? Where is there a room for like, you know what? I don't need to accomplish this to feel good about myself. I'm not a loser if I fail at this goal. I'm not, there's nothing wrong with me. able to do all the things that I want to do. And I think this question of balance between self-acceptance and self-improvement is really, really important because on the surface,

they are contradictory. Like, by definition, to try to improve yourself requires acknowledging something that you're not good enough at. Like something is flawed or incomplete or suboptimal. And the definition of self-acceptance is recognizing that you don't necessarily have to be to improve anything to be okay, to be happy, to be loved, you know, whatever verb you want to throw in there. You know, my approach to this situation, one of the most profound things I ever heard, I was on a meditation retreat when I was in college and the Zen master said, you are perfect as you are and you can always be better.

And that blew my fucking mind and has stuck with me ever since. It's one of those classic Zen paradoxes that if you dig into it, you know, you think into it enough, you find a lot of profound truth. And the way I've come to interpret this is that you need both. If you only have, you are perfect as you are, that generally leads to complacency and narcissism, by the way. If you already think you're fucking amazing at everything you do, you're probably a narcissist. And if you are always focusing on, I can always be better, well, then you probably drive yourself into a lot of insecure, hyperactive, overachieving perfectionist type stuff. And neither of those places are healthy on their own. But when you put them together of like, I am perfect as I am,

but I can also be better. There's some sort of balance that happens. And I think generally people start on one side of that spectrum or the other. There are people who are probably a little bit too complacent and a little bit too accepting of their circumstances. Maybe they don't even think they're accepting of their circumstances. They just blame everybody else for their problems. So they, in a sense, they are kind of accepting their circumstances. And then there are people who are constantly feel like they need to do something, change something, achieve something, accomplish something to, I guess, prove their own value to themselves. And I think for the latter people, the trick is to teach yourself, as it sounds like you have recently, teach yourself to be

fine with not accomplishing everything, not necessarily achieving everything, maybe occasionally not even having a goal. And for the former people, the challenge is to get them to push themselves and to, you know, it's what we talked about with the first question is acknowledging like, hey, I'm kind of screwed up. I need to improve. I need to do this. Let's get it done. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes.

Save the everyday with Amazon. I also think ultimately what matters most is the motivation behind each one. Are you accepting yourself because you're avoiding the problems in your life? Well, then that's probably a kind of a toxic self-acceptance. Are you constantly trying to improve yourself or achieve things or chase after goals because you're running away from a bunch of emotional shit that you don't want to deal with? Well, then that's probably a toxic form of self-improvement. I think ideally these, you need, not only do you want to,

have both, but they need to be motivated by the right thing. The self-acceptance really needs to be motivated by, hey, I'm a flawed human being and that's fine. And I'm still a great person and I've still done a lot of great things and I still like myself. And the pursuit of self-improvement also needs to be motivated by the right thing. It can't be motivated by, well, if I just do this, then people will respect me. Or if I just accomplish that, then I can be happy because that never works that you're kind of just digging the hole even further. Strangely, this really turns into a discussion of self-esteem. Not only do you need both self-acceptance and self-improvement, but there needs to be a

healthy self-esteem underlying both of them. Otherwise, both will fuck you up in various ways. Well, I would just say that I think the balance that I found was very much, the things that I could point to as evidence for actually being. okay with myself. And following through on those things, those things were things that were important to me. And a lot of the things I don't follow through on were like you just mentioned, I was, you know, trying to prove myself to other people or whatever it was. And the balance and the acceptance that I found was I'm okay not having done those things and impressing other people or proving myself to other people.

I'm okay with that. The things I have accomplished feel good to me. And that's where I found it anyway. Yeah, I mean, I would say the final boss for you is probably being okay without accomplishing things that are even important to you, like really fucking something up significant and then learning to be okay with that, like the self-forgiveness. That's the final form of this beast that you're confronting. That's a tall mountain to climb for me. You know, I've always been very driven and done a lot of goals, but my toxicity was more on the self-acceptance side.

I've definitely wrestled with a compensatory narcissism throughout my life, kind of convincing myself my shit doesn't stink. And I think that's why my work is so focused on failure, being wrong, being rejected, because when I was young, my brain just kind of filtered those things out of my reality to protect itself. It is very therapeutic for me to remind myself of those things. Whereas, as you said, you self-flagellate even when probably nothing is even wrong in the first place. Yeah.

And do you think, like, is it okay to use those kinds of examples where I'm at right now anyway is that like I'm using that as evidence? I'm proud of the things that I've done and that's good to me. I think that's somewhat healthy, right? Like you said, you shouldn't be thinking your shit doesn't stink if you haven't done anything, right? Like, so there's a balance there too. now. You know, so a big component of self-esteem is simply accumulating evidence that you have done good and valuable things in the world. That said, I do think there's also a component of it, which I think sometimes is referred to a self-compassion, which is accepting and loving yourself,

even in the moments where you haven't done anything good, where you have actually failed and screwed up, I think that's a component that also needs to be there as well. But that one is super hard. looking back and and kind of noting all the good things you've done throughout your life, I think that's a really good exercise and it's important. But I think the harder exercise is looking at at the low points and the failures and being like, that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm okay.

I think that's, yeah, that's what I kind of came to was that I, there's a lot more of those examples actually. Just because, you know, just statistics, you know, probabilities you're going to try a lot of things and most of them aren't going to work out. And that's what I think I became more accepting of. Yeah. This ties in pretty well with the third question here, which is about self-esteem. And it's actually a criticism of my take on self-esteem and the subtle art of not giving a fuck.

So this is Amy. Let's listen in. My name is Amy Jenkins. I just got the book, The Settled Art of Not Giving Enough and have a couple of questions. In chapter three, you give an example of a man you called Jimmy, who you imply had problems because his self-esteem was too high. You further blame high self-esteem on participation certificates and grade inflation. I think your logic is flawed in drawing a line from high self-esteem to producing people like Jimmy.

I think your angle is wrong. It sounds like you are blaming high self-esteem, and I really think you want to or should blame the overreaction from places like schools and making harmful decisions. I contend that there are many more people with devastating low self-esteem. They deserve to know. they are a worthy human being and that it is a mental health issue that can be treated. The researchers in the 70s should be praised for their findings. Researchers and mental health professionals 40 years later still stand behind that.

So I have two questions. One, would you be willing to dig into the research to either back up or revise your assertions that grade inflation and participation certificates cost too much self-esteem, which then cost people like Jimmy to exist? And two, would you be willing to consider making it clear in future writings and address past publications that highest self-esteem is a critical element of good health? Thanks. Amy, coming in hot. Coming out.

Just throwing bombs. The first thing I'll say about this is, so one of the things that I think readers love about my books is that I have this kind of flip it and ridiculous tone. You know, there's a lot of humor, there's a lot of sarcasm, I'm a little bit over the top. And I think readers really appreciate that, but the problem is that when you come upon a subject like self-esteem that is very nuanced, the nuance gets lost. And this is actually something, I mean, Drew, you and I have talked about this for years with all my articles and newsletters and books and everything. Like there's a tradeoff between entertaining and informing. Every author is somewhere on that continuum.

And I'm definitely probably more on the entertainment side than a lot of authors, especially academic authors. And that's fine. We all have our own roles to play. All that said, I think Amy has a point. I did play a little bit fast and loose with the self-esteem stuff in Chapter 3 of Settlement. So I'd like to use the next few minutes to kind of break down my, actual position with a little bit more nuance, explain the research a little bit better,

and I guess clarify my position beyond, you know, some snarky jokes about participation trophies and a story about my old friend Jimmy. So self-esteem was a term coined by Nathaniel Brandon, I think in the late 50s or early 60s. And I think the original definition of self-esteem is really solid and really, really important, which is basically self-esteem is a very deep and nuanced concept of essentially the quality of a person's relationship with themselves. And the quality of your relationship with yourself is going to have a massive impact on everything you do and every other relationship you have in life.

The problem is, how do you measure that relationship with yourself? What you often find in psychology is that psychologists will come up with a really good concept or construct and then they'll proceed to measure it like fucking shit. It gets so watered down in their surveys and various studies that it kind of becomes like a caricature of itself. And the problem is that early on, psychologists came up with a lot of inventories and surveys that were very surface level. There's always a question of how accurately does the data collected map to the concept as it was originally conceived. And in my opinion, it did not map very well. Psychology eventually figured this out.

In fact, I think in the late 90s or early 2000s, a famous psychologist named Roy Ballmeister did some pretty significant studies where he actually went to maximum security prisons and measured the self-esteem among the inmates there. And not only did he find that inmates of maximum security prisons had high levels of self-esteem, but the most violent and horrible criminals tended to have the highest levels of anybody. So this raised a lot of questions. Like, are we measuring self-esteem?

or are we measuring narcissism? And actually, what is the difference between self-esteem and narcissism? That's actually a very nuanced and difficult question to answer. So I do think the self-esteem question and the measurement of it has gotten better

over the past couple decades. I still think it's an important concept and has significant effects on people's mental health and happiness. But the way it has been measured and implemented throughout history is spotty at best. Now, in subtle art, I actually make the point that the best way to measure self-esteem is not asking how people feel about the good things about themselves. The most

accurate way to measure it is to ask people how they feel about the bad parts about themselves. Somebody with a high self-esteem will look at the worst aspects of themselves and they will say, you know what, I'm not so great at this and I screwed up here and there. That's okay. I'm a good person. I tried my best. I'm going to do better next time, yada, yada. Whereas a person with Self-esteem is either going to have absolutely horrible relationship with the worst aspects of themselves, or if they're narcissistic, they are not even going to acknowledge that they have any bad aspects of themselves at all. So to me, that's a much more effective way of measuring and approaching the concept.

And there have been some researchers in the last 10 years who have taken that approach towards self-esteem, and in my opinion, it's a much better way to go about it. So, while Amy is correct that I did kind of just shit all over self-esteem without giving it a nuanced treatment, I do stand by the conclusion I made in the book. I don't know. I think, though, too, from the research since Rory Baumeister did all that stuff in the late 90s, early 2000s, there's been more research, obviously. It's better research, longitudinal stuff.

What they've also found, though, too, is that the effect sizes that self-esteem has on all these outcomes, so the impact it has on whatever outcome you're measuring, is fairly small, usually in the 8 to 10 percent range. And it's about exactly the same as a lot of other measures that we've looked at, too. So things like self-efficacy, positive emotions, your attachment security, whether or not you have a growth mindset. All of these things are about equal and contributing to a lot of these life outcomes, you know, whether it's school, work, income, all of that stuff. They're all about the same. So I think not only, is kind of the participation trophy trope a little bit overblown.

I think self-esteem itself might be a little bit overblown, too. Yeah, and that wouldn't surprise me because, and I guess this would be the second criticism I have. And again, this kind of got lost in the book because the book really glossed over it. But self-esteem really took a hold of policymakers in the 70s and 80s in a way that no other psychological concept had in the past. And I kind of think maybe growth mindset has took a similar hold in education. But self-esteem really was everywhere.

And it was pitched by a lot of consultants and psychologists at the time as a little bit of a cure-all for a lot of society's ills. And it seemed like an easy implementable solution, I guess, to a lot of policymakers and politicians. And so they bought into it wholesale. So it's just a classic case of something being oversold. It is important. It matters, and it is a good concept, and it absolutely should be studied, and we should work to improve our self-esteem as much as possible. But I just think it was oversold a little bit.

And to Amy's point that psychologists still research it today and take it, stand by it today, that's absolutely true. There are also a lot of psychologists who think it's overblown bullshit and are very critical of it. So like many things in science, it is debated. There's new data coming in all the time. It's complicated. And obviously, when you're writing a fuckbook,

you don't necessarily get into the nuances of that debate. Well, I think, too, though, Mark, part of the overblown nature of self-esteem is probably an artifact of the fact that in the United States, we kind of obsess over feeling good about ourselves, too. right? And so I think it got a lot of air time because of that. Like, policymakers probably grabbed onto that in the 70s and 80s because it's like, yeah, of course, we want to feel great about ourselves. So let's just run with it, right? Yeah, that makes sense. But I do want to bring this back around to the two previous questions because I do think self-esteem is actually incredibly relevant for both of those.

And it kind of solves the paradox of self-improvement, right? Which is somebody with high self-esteem or somebody who is forgiving of their own flaws or tolerant of their own mistakes, they are going to be much more willing to appear try hard or, you know, screw up in front of other people. And somebody with high self-esteem is also not going to compulsively push themselves to accomplish goal after goal after goal. They're going to be a little bit more accommodating of like, you know what, I set this goal, I got halfway there. That's still good. I think it's fine. I do think self-esteem is a critical component of these questions of how do we choose to measure ourselves? Do we choose to measure ourselves by our successes or do we choose to measure ourselves by our mistakes and embarrassments?

And the truth of the matter is, I don't know how much we should measure ourselves by any of those things. I think there's, at a certain point, there's like a fundamental value to yourself that you have to find and acknowledge and live with. That is what makes every other pursuit a little bit easier. So the self-improvement paradox, you are perfect as you are, and you can always be better. Ultimately, you have to be okay with yourself under both conditions. That's the way. That's the way out of it. Sign up for the newsletter, markmanson.net slash newsletter. Send out a bunch of life tips, questions, and exercises for people every Monday morning. Yeah, be sure to leave a review, subscribe to the podcast, tell me how handsome I am, because

Man, my ego needs it. I'm sick of being try hard, man. Just lay it all out there for me. Let me, let me lap it up. Until next time, folks.