The past few years of my life have been unlike any others. Without even meaning to do so, I started on a path of radical self-improvement and experienced some major changes in several of my views. I still don’t know exactly how this journey began, but I’ve made more progress toward where I want to be in life in a couple of years now than I did in the past decade, and my progress appears to be accelerating all the time now.
I’ve always been quick to observe (and often point out) what I considered to be errors in the thought process of other people. Since last year, with the help of books like The Righteous Mind and Thinking, Fast and Slow, it’s become easier to see more of the errors in my own thinking, which has also made me slower to criticize the way others think. Sometimes I catch my errors as they’re happening, but I usually only recognize them well after the fact. Still, being more aware of them has saved me a lot of trouble and motivated me to be sure I’m on the right track with my views (which I’ve done primarily through reading a lot of books that offer explanations for a variety of phenomena in life, with most of my focus being on the stuff in our heads).
It’s become harder for me to be dogmatic or ideological since I started paying more attention to my thought processes, ceasing to identify with my views, finding out more about how my brain works, and learning more of the variables that affect everything in existence. This has made it easier to understand other perspectives, though I still often end up disagreeing with someone after hearing them out and absorbing their take. Seeing more of the bigger picture has shown me where lots of things fit together and complement each other, even things that seem incompatible or contradictory at first glance. As a result, my views have become more nuanced and, I hope, more accurate over time.
I’ve also thought of a ton of ideas for potential solutions to problems, both in my own life and elsewhere in the world. Several of these ideas seemed to come to me fully formed, as if someone else had written them and placed them in my head. My blog has been a way for me to get these ideas out there and organize my thinking so that new ideas come to me more easily. It’s also helped me make regular progress on the book I’m writing about my experiences and realizations, which I hope to have published sometime in the next decade. There’s a lot of writing, editing, and living I have to do before it’s ready, but I always get excited thinking about the impact it’ll have when it’s ready for publishing. I just stumbled onto this path and, with the way everything’s fallen into place since then, I’m sure that this was all meant to be. Thank you for sharing this amazing journey with me. It’s been a great ride and it’ll only get better from here.