7 Principles for Personal Growth

“Man is something that must be overcome.” This devastatingly challenging statement was uttered by the philosopher Nietzsche through his fictional Zarathustra. From ancient philosophers to modern psychologists, most would agree that the path to knowing ourselves and bettering our character is among the most difficult.

My own path started some years ago, when I realized how little I had lived, how much time I had already wasted on senseless pastime and how much of a mess I had allowed myself slip into.

Seldom do people engage in reflection. After all, genuine reflection exposes all the ugliness along with all the beauty in ourselves.

Personal growth is tough business, especially now, with all the external distractions and many voices speaking on this topic — not all agree with one another. From my own journey, I extracted 7 principles that I’ve personally followed and found helpful. Let’s dive right in:

#1 Fix a healthy daily routine

Circa 2017-2018. Standing beside the kitchen island, I watched my day play out in front of my eyes like a movie. Day was my night and night, my day. Whiskey was my water, cigarette smoke my air, UberEats my kitchen, TV shows and porn my pastime, and sugar and coffee (at least) half my caloric intake. What a life!

— And I had the audacity to wonder why I couldn’t function.

Sure, I studied physics back then — it had a way to suck my soul out of me, which later proved to be not my thing at all, but even if it were, it wouldn’t have mattered much. My unhealthy lifestyle would’ve doomed it, anyway.

It wasn’t until I saw my life play out in my mind’s eye that I realized what a fucked-up day I had been repeating over the years.

In the same way that we can’t function — however badly we may want to — when we are sick, we can’t function optimally when our physical health is subpar. Our body is the foundation of our lives — it’s like the soil in which a tree is to grow. If the foundation is bad, the seed may be spoiled long before it sprouts.

I changed my lifestyle over the next couple of months. I got up at a reasonable time. I took time to wash up so that I felt refreshed. I started dressing for the day I anticipated having. I took five minutes to make my bed. I invented a morning routine: 10 minutes of meditation followed by manually brewed coffee. I began starting my day with something I enjoyed doing — reading or writing. I stopped consuming entertainment 1 hour before bed. I started going to bed and waking up at the same time, ensuring seven hours of sleep.

This routine assured that I could at least maintain a normal functioning level every day.

Everyone’s routine may differ, but the point here is to build a healthy baseline. It doesn’t have to be filled with good practices, but at least avoid the bad ones.

Now that a healthy basis is established, it increased the chances of succeeding in pushing myself to grow towards something more.

#2 Expect hardship and failures, and keep going

It has never been easy. Never will be. Personal growth implies that what I am doing right now is not good enough for where I wish to be in the future. It is a highly uncomfortable realization.

There’s also the fact that old habits die hard — they’ve become automatic and it takes tremendous effort to change them. Even the strongest willpower sometimes fails.

No one is perfect and the unexpected will always happen, one way or another. Even as I built my foundational health routine I just mentioned, I failed daily so many times that I don’t even bother counting them anymore.

The keyword is incremental progress. It is easy to get impatient with ourselves. When we conjure up a vision in our heads that we want to achieve, we want it today, the next day, next week. But change takes time, especially when it comes to changing ourselves.

Succumbing to old habits for one incident, one day, doesn’t doom the whole thing — thinking that it does, however, might very well be the doom of it all.

A mental trick I used was to focus on one hour — or even one minute — at a time. I may slip back into old habits one minute, but in the next I can choose to act differently. Don’t aim for big victories, focus on accumulating small wins.

One day, we will have more small wins than setbacks, and unwittingly, we will have changed.

#3 Meditate in silence

I just talked about how change happened in the moment-to-moment decisions. There’s one link missing, however. To make these decisions, it was imperative for me to catch myself red-handed, so to speak. In my own journey of self-growth, I first had to learn to catch those moments when I was tempted to succumb to an old habit, before I could choose differently.

Hence meditation in silence. In the beginning, the guided exercises were helpful. But after I got comfortable with these techniques, the vocal guide became distracting from my thoughts and moods.

Silent meditation allowed my mind to wander through thoughts relevant to whatever happened to be bothering me and to practice noticing them without reacting to them. The guided exercises distracted me from those thoughts.

It was instrumental to my personal growth that I became familiar with my own thoughts and emotional reactions.

But what exactly do you do with these observations?—you might ask. Well, that’s what the 5th principle is for. For now, a little talk about self-reflection.

#4 Inquire inwardly, don’t judge outwardly

The psychologist Carl Jung said, “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” Relatedly, “What irritates us about others can lead to an understanding of ourselves.”

As a psychological rule of thumb, we habitually project negative, unconscious parts in ourselves onto others, which in turn rouses irritation and contempt in ourselves. We might find out that the source of these emotions really are something irritating and contemptible in others’ actions, but even then, we may learn things about ourselves in our reactions.

I am, by temperament, not a fan of rules and orders. This became an obstacle for me when I first started working. I had a lot of counterproductive conflicts with my supervisor. Tensions were high even when we weren’t interacting with each other, and emotions were on the loose when we did. I judged her as irrational and erratic.

But my meditation practices came in handy and I caught myself behaving in irrational ways, directly contrasting my rational thoughts when I calmed down.

I followed Carl Jung’s advice and stopped judging her behaviour. Instead, I asked myself, “What traits in myself contributed to my reaction to my supervisor’s justified coaching according to the standards of my job responsibilities?”

Save the details, the essential thing I discovered about myself was that I was projecting my own childish irrationality onto her. By making her the contemptible villain and taking the moral high ground myself, I escaped facing this immature tendency in my own personality.

Such introspective inquiries help to realize our own roles in whatever situation we perceive to be going on, and more often than not, I’ve found, we are not completely innocent.

That being said, keep in mind that any projection requires a suitable “hook,” as Carl Jung called it. So usually the other person at least fits our perception to some degree, if only it is the way they come off. Thus, don’t think of yourself as delusional just yet—there’s always some truth in our irritation and contempt. On rare occasions, we are completely right, and that’s when we need to stop being tolerant and stand up for ourselves.

Now, back to the question of what to do with the self-observations when we follow the 3rd principle above.

#5 Keep an absolutely private journal, on paper

Not long after I started to fix my bad old habits, I discovered a gap in my endeavours to grow: I had a hard time processing the observed thoughts and behaviours. So I started a private journal.

In the journal, I recounted the incidents that evoked strong emotions and focused on writing down the raw, unfiltered thoughts and feelings. The benefit of such a practice is that I get to be completely honest with myself without the fear of judgment from others.

If you can, try to write the entries with a pen in a physical journal. When you connect the movements of your hand with the actual letters that form the words, you will feel more engaged with your thoughts.

During the journalling, I found out that I could have very dark and disturbing thoughts as well as emotions. If a psychoanalyst read my journal I’d be probably called a neurotic. Keeping it absolutely private helps unlock the brain’s inhibitions.

When journalling, I asked myself with genuine curiosity: What do these thoughts and emotions tell me about this person?

Our ego is often keen on keeping a good image of itself. So I pretended it was a stranger’s journal, and in this way, I got to know the parts of myself that was hidden from me by pride, social norms, or moral values — it prevented me from judging myself.

Looking back at my journal entries, there were many contradictory thoughts and emotions, which allowed me to know all my complex layers. And that’s why I recommend journalling on paper. If done on computer, there would be an urge to make it consistent throughout, for otherwise it feels like the integrity of my own identity was threatened somehow.

These contradictions form an important part of personal growth—to know yourself, past and present, so that you can act from true freedom.

Don’t use white-outs on your journal—see yourself in all the glory and all the dirt, so that it is most real.

#6 Read interesting and difficult books, and read thoughtfully

The first philosophy book I ever read was Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil. Sitting down or leaning against the glass pane on the subway I would take it out of my shoulder bag and start reading between stops. But reading it on transit was a mistake.

I couldn’t trace the thoughts laced between pages, let alone my own thoughts about them. Reading a book is conversing with its author. For me, the reason I pick up a book is because its title and synopsis resonates me, calling to something in me that needs more exploration.

When a book interests me genuinely, it’s like a magical mirror that allows me to look beyond my superficial thoughts and peek behind at my deeper beliefs. That’s why reading Nietzsche on the commute was a disastrous idea. The book pertained to something I was grappling with, yet the reading condition didn’t allow time or a quiet space conducive to thinking.

I’ve stopped reading such books on the move ever since. But why read difficult books at all? Even though I had no intention of taking up philosophy as my vocation, I found it incredibly useful to learn about the ideas on something in my life which someone spent their career thinking about. I came upon and viewpoints that had never occurred to me.

As I experimented with those ideas from someone unbiased towards me (unlike myself), I gained new insights that ultimately led me to growth in the most unexpected ways. So read reflectively and tackle the difficult books. Regardless of how much you actually understand, doing so will expand your mind.

#7 Do the best you can, not what you “should” as dictated by others

There’s an epidemic of self-growth out there. Many take the form of what the title of this very piece suggests—rules to follow. It gives people the sense that if they deviate from those “rules,” they are screwed.

But they are man-made rules and are as fallible as any outrageous speculation we might encounter on the Internet. My own take is, my growth pertains to my personal life, so in order to grow and improve, I need to decide what I need to improve on, and given where I am, how much I can manage to do on a daily basis.

I believe there’s no one way to grow as a person. When I first got started, I came across this “rule” that I had to find a role model, and copy what he/she does, thereby improving myself. The assumption is that if I see them as role models, then they represent a version of me that I’d like to become. But when I followed this, I became my own tyrant and ended up trying to live like someone else.

Then I came across a version of this 7th principle, given as an advice in a public speech by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson: Incremental improvement. I found out what I’d like to change and how much change I was capable of making without burning myself out. It worked.

The fundamental reason behind this principle is that even though those standards set by others might as well be good advice, they don’t consider each individual’s unique circumstances, abilities, and goals. The public nature of these advices determined that they can’t—too many individuals are out there, too many variables.

This goes for any advice we might receive, but especially in the area of personal growth. When an advice hits a chord, take it in, but reflect on your personal life, listen to your own conscience, and adapt the advice to your actual circumstances.

Principles, being guidelines and frameworks of patterns of behaviour, are naturally generic and vague. The seven above are the ones I have already practiced for a while, and have been working for me thus far.

If it resonates and helps even one person in one small aspect of your life, that’s great. But if not, I hope at least it gives you food for thought.

Cheers!

- Bill Yuan, RPQ