You need to now what's not working

If you want to change, you need to know what isn’t working.

Change is an ongoing process, and without self-reflection, you aren’t going to see any of it. Today isn’t yesterday isn’t tomorrow.

So, what’s the best way to find out what isn’t working?

This is hard, because it requires you to be absolutely honest with yourself. Everyday, you spend time watching YouTube. Is this helping you? Is this hurting you? What are the opportunity costs of watching YouTube? Is it worth it?

Opportunity Cost: In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost of a choice is the value of the best alternative forgone where, given limited resources, a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives. Wikipedia

Now, imagine doing this for everything you do in a day. It sounds exhausting and tedious, and how are you supposed to judge all of that anyway?

Well, you don’t need to do everything at once. If I ask you what’s the one thing you can change to make you day to day better, I bet you could name something. Do you smoke? Have a troubled relationship with food? Are you lonely? Is your relationship not fulfilling you? Do you feel like a bad person? Are you drowning in debt?

There’s something called the Pareto Principle which is basically 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. So, flipping it, 80% of the stress and strife in your life comes from 20% of what you do.

Identifying the big things in your life that aren’t working is probably going to make the biggest changes in your life. These big things are the ones you should target first. The smaller things can come later.

If you’ve never spent a lot of time in self-reflection, it might take you some time to figure out what your big things are. You have to look at your day and ask yourself is this helping or hurting? Is this helping me be the kind of person I want to be or is it keeping me from that person?

Yesterday, I said one of the big drains I had was watching short-form video content. I cut that out by uninstalling YouTube and Instagram from my phone and setting time limits for them on my other devices. Now, the time I used to spend doom scrolling has been replaced with… more doom scrolling but on Reddit now, but also with time away from the internet to write this.

Change is an ongoing process, and identifying the things that are holding you back is just one step towards helping you get to where you want to be. Change is a cycle and it’s going to keep going up and down and up and down.

But, if you work at it, your downs won’t be as down as they used to be, and your ups will slowly, gradually, trend upward. At least, we can hope they will.

But, how do we know what isn’t working for us? How do we know what change we are hoping for? That’s for tomorrow.