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I used to be obsessed with "self-improvement" and the idea that anyone could become Napoleon. That anyone who really gives a fuck can modify and tweak their behavior one day at a time, until they're operating at the level of a god. That idea turned out to be total bullshit. For the most part, it's just not possible. Your brain just doesn't allow for a certain degree of departure from its baseline. If you try, the brain will put up immense barriers: You'll get stressed, you'll get tired, you'll get bored, you'll get insomnia, your hair will fall out, your skin will go grey. We simply don't have the bodily mechanisms needed to enact these large scale, long-term positive changes in our bodies and minds that we think we do, other than simply becoming wiser due to experience. Probably the critical flaw within the Anglo tradition of self-improvement is the belief that you can take your current personality and just "upgrade" it to become more diligent, more timely, more conscientious, more patient, more open-minded etc. Most of these come down to personality. You can optimize your behavior to extract the most out of the values you DO have (Which is what Ben Franklin made extensive use of), but you are not going to increase your share of virtue overall. It's not going to happen. Not to say it can never theoretically happen, but as of now we don't have the tools to do this.⏱ 4d↩