The driving principle behind self-improvement is this: You cannot improve your self until you create the very self you seek to improve.

In fact, the sole purpose for me writing about self-improvement is to help free the dormant creator inside you whose been buried underneath layers of rapidly-accretive, habitual consumption. Consumption is our default animal behavior. We all can’t help but do it. The crazy thing is that there exists only one way to disable these instincts; a magical ability only Gods and men possess: the act of creation.

Creation is the motive force of Life (itself our creator) channeled through you via the unique frequency in which you’re able to connect to it. And if you never make that connection, you will never know what the hell you’re doing here. Living partially phased; evaporating your identity through meaningless consumption.

The act of creating is the only vehicle you have for obtaining truths in this world. And by “creating” I don’t just mean artistic or engineered things either. It’s more creating the episodes of your lived experience in a way that feels, almost suspiciously, easy. Anyone can achieve this — regardless of personality type, trauma, or past experiences. By divine right, we have all been given access to this infinite creative capacity. It’s baked into us as a species with our faculty for language and through it a means to become synchronized with whatever name you may use for an eternal soul.

I’ll frequently opine that “increasing understanding” is the whole point for life existing. But what’s more important to consider, is that the only way to provably increase understanding is through creations. As creations are allowed to interact with reality, and other creations, truths stack. From transient thoughts to unfinished drafts to rejected versions to final productions, with an infinity of realizable styles, scopes, and significance, the act of creating, in all its forms, is you. That’s right, your celestial identity is a verb; for to be you is to be in flux. Everything else in existance merely serves as maintenance and in support of potentiating Life’s total net creative power. With each interaction against their tiny slice of local reality, creations serve as our obligation to Life so that one day it may use them to understand all that can be.

Pain leads the path

One established way to help reveal your inner creator is to continuously push the limits of what you thought you could do. This does not come from personal reflection, but from embracing emotional lessons learned from smashing head-first into one of life’s invisible and ever shifting walls. Big changes in self will always accompany the hardest moments. They act like guardrails for exploring life, steering you towards the right direction by hurting your ego every time you run into one.

Though it’s easier said than done, the worst moments in your life should be truly precious and never avoided or escaped. They should be delicately savored; to be deeply examined while in them; to be used. Struggles can be your greatest gift or your total undoing. I’ve gone through some doozies myself and let me save you the suspense: there will be unavoidable moments that permanently change you, and who you thought you were supposed to be. You won’t go back, whether you try to resist or not. They’re the nomic “one-way doors”. Your only choice is whether to turn these moments into keystones for your divine aqueducts or letting them be the parodic Sisyphean boulders blocking ascent of your Celestial Mountain.

Self-help: a contradiction

Pedantically, even the word “self-help” doesn’t make sense. If you help yourself, that’s just help - with you being the someone being assisted. So by this definition, you can only provide actual help if you’re the one creating it; since you are the self providing the “self-help”. You’re the one taking each incremental step to be better than you were yesterday. So that means you’re the one who must plan a route on the map and repeatedly navigate your journey of discovery.

Blindly following the popular and pithy self-help gurus or public mentors will never work… It may provide help for characters your self is trying to play; the personas which you think society expects of you. I’ll grant that some people can play these miscast characters very well for a while, but the singular part for which you were made to play always bubbles up to the top. Whether it’s through genes, germs, God, or gravity, this is a truth nobody can escape.

The question is: do you want to be the one who’s constantly avoiding, resisting, or searching desperately for their proper place or do you want to be the one who has finally found out how to embody their teleologic form, granting access to innate superpowers of eternally-destined edification? It turns out, for the latter, you can only listen from within for directional guidance that actually works. This can only happen through the ownership of your continuous creation. You create the moves. You create the style. You create the direction. You constantly fumble during the process, but you do it your way. You create yourself. Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds.

Themes

To help frame this continuous endeavor, I’ve made a list of guiding themes. You’ve probably seen some form of these somewhere and that’s because, for better or worse, they’re unequivocally true:

1. Create, don't consume ~~ be the main character, not an NPC

2. Intentionally create reality every day ~~ or others will create it for you

3. Own each moment regardless of the next ~~ master being present to master your future

4. Your subconscious is smarter than you ~~ feelings come from veridical knowledge learned

5. Compare yourself only to your yesterself ~~ and never with anyone else

6. Hardship is growth and that’s the point ~~ struggling can feel good if done right

7. Actions always beat thoughts ~~ creation only works through action

Life can be yours, but only if you create it. Hopefully, that path starts now.

- TM Bird