I spent an entire year reading all the self-help books and basically reinvented myself and today I want to share with you guys what I’ve learned.

Roughly a year ago I found myself in a challenging stage of my life. I was taking a break from photography and this youtube channel and I didn’t have a clear sense of direction. For a long time, all I wanted was to get better in photography, and I thought the things that I wanted in life would come from that. But I had neglected to ask myself what I was going to do with that skill and what I wanted to make in the future.

So I took some time to search for the answers. I began by listening to all the podcasts, watching the videos, listening to other people’s stories to see how others got successful in life. And eventually I found myself reading these books. I used to think these books were almost like scams: filled with words to sell you a lie about some dream life. But at the time I didn’t care because I was desperate. And looking back on it, I’m glad I read them.

Despite the fluff there were many valuable things I learned that have allowed me to regain control of my life and get back to doing the things I love like photography and youtube. So if you’re struggling in life right now, I’d like to share a few of those things with you. I think they’d help.

Learning How to Prioritize

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. We have to start with this book because it’s the classic of classic self-help books. Initially, I was pretty skeptical about it because many of the words in this book were…weird. But I tried to keep an open mind and pretended like I knew nothing about anything.

So as I read and read I started to understand a bit more about this book. It’s not so much of a practical book but a mindset book. This book is all about manifestation. You think and therefore you become. And it doesn’t mean that in the literal sense. It means that your mindset and your perspectives on success, fullfillment, happiness, and life are the problem - not you.

For example, if you walk around thinking the world is a terrible place and that no matter what you do you’ll never accomplish anything, that will be your life.

But if you understand that the world is a place of abundance and we can get/achieve whatever we want, then all things will become possible for you. It becomes our very mindset and desires that will lead us to take the appropriate actions to get what we want (and if we want anything bad enough, there’s no reason why we wouldn’t be able to get it)

A good quote that helps show this is:

So if you’re having trouble in life right now, understand that it is in your control. You can pick and choose where you want to go and if you want anything badly enough you can figure it out. Google the steps, make the plan, do the thing. You can do it.

Think and Grow Rich was a good first step one on my journey but it didn’t quite grant me what I wanted. I was already committed to this photography art thing for the long term. What I was searching for was not more belief in myself, but something more practical and tangible. I was looking for something I could actually do to make changes.

And this led me to the next book - Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I found this in my local used bookstore for a dollar. So I was like okay what the heck, I’ll give it a shot.

In the book, Covey teaches us something called the “Eisenhower Matrix”. The Eisenhower Matrix is an easy way for us to prioritize our lives - by identifying what’s important and what’s not.

To break it down, in life there are four types of tasks. There are important/unimportant tasks. And there are urgent/non-urgent tasks. And it’s often in life that we mix up urgency and importance and we tend to prioritize things that have close deadlines don’t actually matter.

The most important quadrant is what Covey calls the “important non-urgent” task. This would be like an essay you have that’s due in two weeks. Or the test you have coming up the next week. It’s coming. It’s important. But it’s not yet urgent.

Covey suggests that if we can spend our time on quadrant 2, the “important-nonurgent” tasks, we can have the best work life balance. This is because most of our stress comes from procrastinating and waiting for the deadline of a project. However, if we can identify that something is important early on and begin working on it before it becomes urgent, we can complete our tasks ahead of time. The more we can do this, the less stressed and more productive we’ll be.

Of course things like random medical emergencies can’t be helped. They’re urgent and important. But the most day-to-day tasks we can apply this framework to.

And so really what this means, is that we have to be able to prioritize and say no. The more we can say no, the more we can say yes to the actual things that matter.

Covey says,

So this book really taught me how to prioritize my life. No longer was I editing every photo, or trying to make every single youtube video idea work. Instead I could focus on the important photos I wanted to release as prints and the few videos that would be fun to make.

I started making lists, classifying the different tasks, and crossing a bunch of stuff off. If you look at my weekly planners from even half a year ago, they were a mess. I had written down everything I could possibly do, and decided somehow that I was going to do everything. You can imagine how that went.

The most challenging part was that it felt as if the world might collapse if I didn’t do this thing or that thing. But the moment I allowed myself to stop doing these unimportant things, I realized: okay, everything is still fine. The world still works. Which kind of means I was wasting a lot of time over the years doing things I didn’t need to be doing. But that’s okay because I’ve learned - and things are better now.

So if you’re finding yourself feeling overwhelmed by a million things you think you have to do, make a list or a table. Classify the stuff you have to do and start crossing off all the unimportant stuff. It’ll save you so much headache.

Finding Uniqueness and Making it Work

So we’re about half a year into this self-improvement journey. Covey’s book was good, and we’re making some progress, but I still felt like we were missing some key things. For every good book I read, there must’ve been 10 bad ones.

So I kept searching. After all, the goal was to take control of my life and be able to do the things I loved in a better more sustainable way.

It was around this period that I ran into Naval Ravikant’s content. I first saw him on Joe Rogan and much of his wisdom deserves their own videos, but I want to talk about the main game changers here.

In the Almanack of Naval Ravikant, there are sections on both wealth and happiness - two equally important topics in anyone’s journey. Today however, we’ll talk about an important concept Naval has called “specific knowledge”. Understanding this concept allowed me to understand how pursuing your interests, like art and photography, can actually help you in the long run.

“Specific knowledge” is knowledge that is not obtained from the education system. It’s knowledge that we get from our own tinkering and experimentation. From going deep into things we naturally like and enjoy. For example, in photography I’ve acquired a bit of specific knowledge of how to take certain photos, how to color grade in specific ways, how to get certain shots, that I could have only learned by doing and figuring it out in the real world.

This “specific knowledge” is what makes you irreplaceable, especially as an artist. Its why even if another artist tries to copy someone else’s style, even with the right methods and everything, the end result is still going to be different. There’s specific knowledge that is missing.

Naval said,

This idea of specific knowledge is what helped me get back into photography. I had so many qualms about the things I was making because they weren’t what everyone else was doing. How I approach my art isn’t very clinical and it’s not what other photographers would tell you to do. But now I understand that it really doesn’t matter. It’s apples to oranges, and if you continue improving your version of your thing, that’s what will get you the best end result. And that’s what will make you the most happy in life anyways.

So if you’re having trouble with your own path in life, think back to the things you were interested in. What was it that you enjoyed the most? What did you find yourself diving deeply into a rabbithole that very few others were, purely for the sake of it? That might be your area of specific knowledge and may be where you are meant to go.

Next on the list of life-changing books is Atomic Habits. You’ve probably seen this book, everywhere, from Target shelves to local bookstores. And I didn’t want to read it because it was so hyped. But it is for a reason - because it’s good. It’s a book that will help you reorganize your life with a concept we are all familiar with: habits.

If I had to break it down, habits are all about two things: making it difficult and making it easy.

For the good habits, try to make it as easy as possible for you to do.

For the bad habits, try to make it as hard or difficult for you to do.

Our minds naturally want to do the easy things. And if something is hard, we usually don’t want to do it.

Take for example if you want to get rid of your drinking habits. One trick you can do is to the leave the can of beer far far in the back of the fridge so you can’t see it. That way when you open your fridge you’re less likely to say “oh I might as well have a beer today.” This is because you might not see the beer in the first place. You can take this even further by not having the beer in the fridge so it stays warm. Because there’s nothing worse than a warm beer. You can dial this even further to not even having beer in your house, making it you have to go to the store if you want to drink.

Not saying this will cure your alcoholism but it’ll definitely make it harder.

Now to build good habits we would do the opposite: make things as easy for us to do as possible.

For example, if you want to write more, having your notebook, pencil, or word doc ready to go at the beginning of every morning, will make it easy to write. This is what James Clear calls “priming your environment for future use.” You’ll find yourself saying, welp everything’s already setup - I might as well just write for 30 minutes and feel better about myself like I actually did something today.

Or, you could try leaving your sunblock right next to your keys so that every time you leave the house, you’re reminded to put on sunblock - it’s right there ready to go.

If we take this and apply them to other parts of our life, one by one, the changes become exponential. These little things that may seem small or meaningless, really add up.

James Clear wrote,

So in my case, I knew I wanted to release a bunch of photography prints. I knew I wanted to get back to making these youtube videos. So I made things as easy as I could. My laptop, my desk, everything is setup so that when I wake up I get right to work. I also make it hard for me to do things I know are bad for me. When I sleep I put my phone on the far side of the desk which prevents me from scrolling at night or in the morning. I have to get up to get my phone. And these little things work.

So if you are looking to build good habits and get rid of bad habits, remember two things:

For good habits, make it easy. For bad habits, make it hard.

Putting it All Together

It’s been about 8-9 months in and I’m already starting to feel like a new and improved person. I’ve built some good habits and got rid of bad ones and I’ve begun to accept myself more as an artist even if others might not like what I make.

But there’s one last book I want to bring up that has allowed me to hold all these thoughts together. The final piece of the puzzle. You see, I had been reading, reading, reading for like the past 9 months, and my mind was full of too much information. And I needed some balance.

Essentialism

This is where Essentialism by Greg McKeown comes in. This was the book that allowed me to put it all together.

Now you may or may not have heard of essentialism, but you’ve probably heard of the term “less is more.” They’re basically the same thing.

I had heard the phrase many times but I never fully understood it. In life, I always thought doing more and harder work was the solution to my problems. That’s how we get what we want, by working hard. But this book taught me that most of what we do actually doesn’t matter.

For example, it’s often we’ll see many musicians have one or two hit songs that carry their careers. This doesn’t mean their other songs are bad, but from an objective viewpoint, it’s really just one or two songs that gave them the most money and success in their career.

Greg McKeown quotes John Maxwell here,

Now this is not to say that “there’s no point in doing anything”. It just means that in a world where only a small amount what we do actually matters (outcome wise) we shouldn’t work “harder” but instead figure out what’s important for us to work on in the first place. This way we can save tons of time, stress, energy, and money by focusing on the essentials. Now it becomes our choice. We choose what’s essential to us. And if we spend time doing what’s essential to us, there will be no wasted time.

So at the end of the day it boils down to you determining what you consider “essential”. You determine what’s worth doing.

For me, something is “essential” if I want to make it and enjoy making it. This may mean making a video that no one cares about or putting prints up for sale that no one buys. I’m actually even working on a photo zine right now that I might release to the public for once. Not because it’s some life changing book or amazing photography or whatever. But because I want to make it and share it with others.

My life has become better this way. I’m doing more of what I like and less of what I don’t like.

To apply this to your life, first figure out what’s “essential” for you. What do you enjoy doing most and what do you want to do more of? This could be art, this could be riding bikes, whatever. Remember what Naval said about specific knowledge? What you’re uniquely good at is usually something you’re also uniquely interested in. Then, start using Stephen Covey’s prioritization skills and the James Clear’s habit stuff that we learned above to apply this to your life. Do this over and over and over and you will figure it out.

So as you can tell this last year was a lot for me. And I’m glad to say that I’ve come a long way and feel very strong going into the future. I’m back to making these youtube videos and my connection with photography is better than ever.

Of course my self-improvement doesn’t end here. There will always be new obstacles and challenges to face. It’s often I find myself rereading many of these books to remind myself of the lessons I’ve forgotten. And I’ll probably be working on myself for the rest of my life. I’m cool with that. It’s fun.

But don’t just take my word for it. Give the books a try, read something and build your own foundation for life. Self-improvement might suck in the short term but it really is worth it looking back on it. I hope this blog could grant you some tools or maybe inspiration to help you in your own journey.

Thanks for reading.