Today, I want to share a few of many personal experiences that have fueled my continuous improvement journey throughout these years:
- Writing
- Reading
- Strength training
Writing
Writing has never been easy for me. From elementary school all the way up to college, I’ve always struggled with writing essays. Math was typically easy (to a certain point), but I have vivid memories of always struggling with writing. Even in business, I can recall countless the countless hours I spent refining a single business email. I experienced brain fog, and the entire process of articulating my thoughts into words while expressing my personality was difficult. As I continued to practice, I improved but not overnight. In hindsight, the huge leaps in improvement is only noticeable years later.
Reading
It feels like yesterday when I started my habit of active reading and learning. I started roughly 12 years ago at a coffeeshop where I often studied in Koreatown, Los Angeles. I remember sitting down one day; I opened a book (I think it was Peter Lynch’s: One Up On Wallstreet), and I couldn’t get past the first page for over 30 minutes! I remember my eyes getting dry and tears forming in my eyes from yawning from the severe cognitive strain. But I kept at it for the next 30 days. There were marginal improvements and no significant improvements initially. What motivated me was, I reasoned that being steadfast and consistent was the only way I would ever get good at reading because improvements were so slow.
Strength Training
I think I l have one of the worst genetic types for gaining strength and muscle. When I was 18, I started working out. All of my friends that I worked out with made me question if I had some sort of testosterone deficiency. It’s possible. Although my friends and I would still meet up for the gym, I started going to the gym by myself more often. I was able to comfortably experiment and learn what works for me, and eventually developed my own unorthodox strength training routine. my body responded better to significantly less volume, which I believe allowed my central nervous system to recover much faster than before. Strength gains were exponential which surprised my friends. But, as with anything you keep at it long enough, I experienced occasional setback injuries which slowed my rate of growth. So as these setbacks slowed down my speed of progress, I reasoned that the only way I could sustainable grow was to be more consistent than everyone else.
Practical Process for Implementation — Copy, then Innovate
“Copy, then innovate” is my own iteration of the quote “good artists copy, great artists steal”. For anything I’m not an expert at (most things), I copy and leverage existing work as a baseline and then add my own twist to it. I’ve successfully applied this tactic to writing, where I would save well-written emails, deconstruct the sentences, and extract the words and phrases that I liked so that I can use it later. I would copy others until their writing became my own.
Takeaway
Never, ever, let anything you’re not good at now demotivate you from continuously improving at it. If anything, it’s more of a reason why you should put in more effort, daily.
Welcome 