The Most Important Thing I Have Learnt After Reading 25+ Self- Improvement Books In The Last Year

Don’t preach what you don’t practice.

It was probably the start of the Pandemic back in March 2020 which prompted the beginning of my self improvement ‘journey’.

Fed up of letting life ‘control me’ and getting stressed at the smallest of things — I was not sure if it was the excessive partying or the 12 hour screen time — made me realize that I needed a kick up the arse.

But despite my grades going downhill, all I seemed to care about was when the next time I got laid or got drunk with my friends.

The Covid-19 pandemic meant I was shipped back home and living back at home with my parents gave me a deep insight to what life would be like when I graduated. No more clubbing for the foreseeable future, and being in lockdown meant I had no choice but to do the work. A 19-year old’s nightmare.

With Lockdown came a lot more free time. Free time which I could have spent hours on Tiktok and playing videogames. Or free time I could have spent reading or doing something ‘productive’.

I chose the latter (but still spent endless hours on Tiktok of course). I have always been a ‘book worm’ and have enjoyed reading books all my life. But it wasn’t until Spring 2020 that I began really getting into non-fiction. Self- Improvement books to be precise.

My first book was Atomic Habits by James Clear. Second book was Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. Next thing you know I was churning through a book a week (depending on length of course), and investing a lot of time and money into reading.

Fast forward to Summer 2020 and I was now obsessed with Self- Improvement. I was seeing results; grades were getting better, for once I felt ‘on top of things’ and had a lot more clarity. Physically I was getting stronger, and mentally I was much less stressed and more focused on what actually mattered in my life.

Please note that apart from reading I also adopted other habits such as cold showers, meditation, affirmations, healthy sleeping pattern and working out.

But at what point does this urge to improve oneself go from healthy to unhealthy? At what point does it go from productive to unproductive?

The reason you read a ‘self improvement’ book is to provide you with information which could be used to help you in your life. They can be very useful tools and some even provided small epiphanies (particularly Mark Manson’s ‘Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck’). Most importantly, they can help you to have a better life.

But there is a catch.

In order to make the most of these self improvement books you have to take action in some way or act upon what you have learnt. There is no point reading about a book which is called ‘how to be happier’, and the main takeaway is to think more positive — yet you don’t even try to think more positive after reading it. You kind of expect to feel happier because you have read a book about it.

Whilst this may sound kind of dumb for most of you reading this, it wasn’t until I spoke to a friend recently about this new book I was reading when he told me “All this reading, no action”. Although I had started a new book that day, it had not crossed my mind to sit there and think whether I had learnt or gained anything from the last book I had finished the day before.

Instead, I was stuck in a self improvement reading cycle which was more of an ego thing to get through as many books as possible in the hope that this would make me tantamount to a philosopher one day.

But the worse thing was, I was preaching all the stuff I had read about to the people I was around. But in most cases I wasn’t practicing or using the stuff I was reading to better my own life. I was reading, not learning. Preaching, not practicing.

Ever since this realization I have read fewer self-improvement books, but have learnt much more from these few books than when I read those twenty books combined.

By applying what you have learnt after reading these self- help books is the key for self improvement. Instead of regurgitating what you have read, in my case to impress others, actually use the concepts to see if they benefit you.

This realization that reading all of these books wasn’t really improving my life was one of the biggest and most important part of my self improvement journey. Ironically, it was the biggest epiphany I had in a way. But small, silly things like this are important. Because it is when you realize these things, change and improvement actually happens.