3 ways to excel in personal development

Have you ever met someone who reads a self-help book and the following week they have fully integrated it into their life and are already seeing huge benefits from its advice? On the other hand, someone else could read the same book, apply nothing and languish.

Here are three tips to help you make more use of your self-improvement knowledge.

1. Approach personal development like a software engineer

You are a software engineer and your code doesn’t work. You try to understand why but you get stuck. In response, you strip the system down to its simplest part, add error logging, test your simple version, and debug it if necessary. Once you are sure that this part works, you start adding other components into your code, repeating the same process. You iterate until you have fully functional code that does everything you need.

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, removing a system, making each part work, and rebuilding it again are mental models that engineers naturally apply on a regular basis.

To benefit from self-improvement, focus on making one part of a system work first: refine and master it before moving on to the next piece. If you’re having difficulty, reduce the part of a system you’re trying to debug to a small part.

2. Invite yourself to recognize patterns for better knowledge transfer

Knowledge transfer is the biggest challenge in learning. We fail to apply our ideas and solutions to new contexts. This trend is believed to have an evolutionary basis. If we knew that one berry is safe, it would be dangerous for us to assume that a slightly different berry is safe. Therefore, we have evolved to have what is called narrow generalization gradients.

However, research shows that simply asking someone to determine whether 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 beam of high-intensity radiation would destroy the tumor but also damage surrounding healthy tissue. The tumor problem is solved by using multiple low-intensity radiation beams directed from different directions, which focus their power on the tumor without damaging healthy tissue.

When people are given the answer to the tumor problem, they still have difficulty transferring their knowledge to a similar problem. An example: a general wants to attack a fortress but cannot send all his troops through a single heavily guarded route without them being easily discovered. The solution is to divide the army into small groups, sending them on multiple routes to converge on the fortress at the same time. Few people see this solution naturally, but people’s success increases dramatically if they know the solution to the tumor problem, and if you explicitly ask them if there are any connections between the two problems.

The takeaway: When you learn a self-improvement principle from a book or blog post, you should repeatedly and frequently ask yourself whether it is relevant to new problems that you must resolve, to decisions large and small, and to the different contexts and situations that you face in your daily life.

3. Use personalized instructions with AI chatbots to integrate your information about yourself into your daily creation

To support knowledge transfer, work on decisions and challenges with your favorite AI discussion tool. Provide it with personalized instructions that ask it to remind you of the patterns you are trying to change and the new patterns you want to practice.

Personalized instructions are like super prompts. These are personalized settings you give to the AI ​​to help it shape how it interacts with you on an ongoing basis. These are different from regular prompts, which are one-off questions you ask the AI ​​during a conversation. Personalized instructions are used to influence each specific interaction.

If you try to change a pattern or implement self-help tips, let the AI ​​know. goals in your personalized instructions. For example, to stop yourself from being distracted from your big vision, you can set personalized instructions like these: “I may be distracted from my core goals by new opportunities or by compromises with other people. Make sure I don’t lose sight of my goals. goals or compromise with others in a way that compromises my goals. If you see evidence of this in our conversations, remind me of this pattern, remind me of my goals, and encourage me to stay focused. For reference, my goals are (. tell him your goals, your big vision).”

You can see a detailed example of how to use personalized instructions for personal knowledge transfer in this video clip.

Final Thoughts: Applying Self-Improvement Strategies Effectively

There are many great self-help tips, both in books and right here on TP. Applying it consistently can be difficult, especially if you’re already feeling overwhelmed or struggling. However, using some specific strategies can make you much more successful and make your job easier. stress burden. Try the techniques shared here to better transfer your learning into your life.