Orgin story

I am 29 and I have spent most of my 20's trying to improve myself in some way. I don't know where it all started or why. Why do you suddenly believe that you are not good enough and need improving? As a kid I wanted to be better at certain activities or tasks, stuff like basketball or school or being nicer to my parents. I don't think I ever even contemplated the idea of wanting to improve myself for the sake of becoming a better me. But regardless I eventually did discover the allure and obsession of trying to be the best me I could be and in the process I have spent countless hours obsessing/beating myself up over it and accumulating many self-help books.

What's the result? It's been almost 10 years and I can't say I have become "better" in any real way. The more I think about it, the more I am sure that self help sucks. You can't improve yourself in a vacuum. If anything it leads to a lot of self-obsession and navel gazing. Which I guess is what the self help industry wants. The more problems you find with yourself and the more crappy and inadequate you feel, the more money you will spend trying to fix yourself.

If you really want to improve something in your life you need to look outside of yourself and focus on real things. You need to be that 10 year old who wants to improve her jump shot, not the 27 year old who wants to "get into shape" whatever that means. Don't improve yourself, develop skills so you can improve things outside of yourself. Whether that be a book you are trying to write a closet you are trying to keep organized, a 10k you want to run.

This may may seem like I'm just playing with semantics: don't try to shape yourself, try to shape something else and in the process you will change.  Maybe it is just semantics, but I really do think that we would actually "improve" much more and be a lot less crazy in the process if we took the focus off ourselves.

Thats what this blog is about, a lab, Avtar Lab, where I (Avtar) can try out this theory myself. I will break out those self-help books I bought over the years. I was going to throw them away but then I thought that maybe they would be useful if  used a little differently. Instead of applying the ideas and techniques to myself (where before they ended up not helping) I am going to apply them to activities and things in my life that I care about. Hopefully these books were not a total waste of money. I will blog about things like how hard or easy it is to keep the focus off myself, the books themselves, whether I am improving the things I want to improve, and finally how I change.  I want to know  if taking the focus off yourself changes the your perception of reality and the whole concept of improvement.

I know that in a way this whole blog could be seen a a form of navel gazing. But I am going to try to be more objective and scientific than I am normally. Also I don't think reflecting on your experiences is real dangerous navel gazing  as long as you stay semi-objective, rational and thoughtful and  don't downward spiral into ME ME ME ME thinking.