The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths by Anna Katharina Schaffner

 The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths by Anna Katharina Schaffner 

Our appetite for self-improvement has never been greater: in 2020, the personal development market was valued at $39.99 billion worldwide and is forecast to grow rapidly over the next few decades.

At the most fundamental level, our desire to improve ourselves, and the belief that this is possible, is an act of rebellion against the idea of determinism. Engaging in the act of self-improvement is our—however flawed—effort to exert control over our lives. It is an attempt to defy whatever forces we may blame for our perceived insufficiencies: nature or nurture, genes or the environment, God, karma, fate, or the constellation of the planets. Our belief in the improbability of the self can therefore be seen as a powerful proclamation of defiance, an assertion of agency in a world where it is all too easy to feel powerless and adrift.

Know Thyself

The Greek philosopher Socrates (470–399 BCE) went even further, declaring that the unexamined life is not worth living. He proclaimed self-knowledge as an absolute good, indeed as our highest virtue. In Plato’s Five Dialogues, Socrates reflects: So I withdrew and thought to myself: ‘I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ The jury, unconvinced by his defense, found him guilty, and Socrates was sentenced to death.

For there is no universal agreement on what a self really is. There are, for example, crucial differences between East Asian and Western notions of selfhood. The philosopher Julian Baggini argues that there are three main ways of conceptualizing the self:

• the no-self (as found in Buddhist traditions),
• the relational self (as found in Confucianism and certain Japanese traditions), and
• the atomized self (as found in most, but by no means all, Western accounts of selfhood)

Buddhists believe that we have no lasting, unchanging essence. Instead, we consist of five impermanent aggregates: our physical body, sensations and feelings, perceptions, mental activity, and consciousness. These aggregates bundle together in constantly changing constellations. What we think of as the self is therefore merely an assemblage of fleeting processes

Richard N. Bolles knew this well. His book What Color Is Your Parachute? (1970) has been described as the world’s most popular job-hunting guide. It is structured precisely around Ficino’s idea of engineering as good a match as possible between our natural bent and our profession. According to Bolles, it is necessary to take an inventory of the self, which enables us first to establish and then to plan our careers around our key passions and preferences.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca writes: Our relations with one another are like a stone arch, which would collapse if the stones did not mutually support each other, and which is upheld in this very way.

Jordan B. Peterson’s. In his bestselling 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018), Peterson recommends that we copy the ways of the top-lobster. For it is winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent.

Abraham Maslow in Primitive physiological needs form the basis of his model, followed by safety, belongingness, and esteem, and at the very top, self-actualization. Other theories of our most fundamental needs prioritize attachment, terror management, and self-determination.

The psychologist Robert Kegan, for example, argues that there are only two great human yearnings—our striving for autonomy and independence and our need for inclusion and communion—and they are in conflict with one another. We could also add a need for beauty in its various forms.

Most, if not all, of our historically and culturally changing self-improvement aims, I believe, be traced back to these five basic needs

1. Social relations encompass our desire to feel connected, accepted, and part of a community. They also include our longing for understanding, friendship, and love.

2. Status includes our need for respect and attention, but also for power, influence, and control. Concerns about status may be manifest in a preoccupation with what others think about us and a desire to impress them—be that via looks, wit, ideas, clothes, cars, or other objects of conspicuous consumption. It may also be manifest in our need for professional recognition in the form of promotion, for social media likes and followers, or simply in feeling that our voices and opinions are heard and that we are taken seriously. At a deeper level, status relates to the hope that our existence matters and that it is positively acknowledged by others.

3. Learning is connected to our thirst for knowledge and understanding, as well, of course, to our desire to improve ourselves. Throughout our lives, most of us seek to continue to expand our understanding of the world. This includes the spiritual and the metaphysical, and questions pertaining to the meaning of our existence. Depending on which of these metaphors we adopt, as the American sociologist Micki McGee observes, we may imagine ourselves as combatants, contestants, or players; travelers or explorers; and entrepreneurs, salespersons, or managers. For the combatants, contestants, and players, winning is the goal, while power and wealth are typically the prizes. For the traveler or explorer, rewards tend to be experiential, nonmaterial, and spiritual. The entrepreneurial cluster, finally, is motivated by material gains.

4. Our desire for variety is what motivates us to travel to faraway places, to get to know new people, and to build new relationships. A form of epistemic and experiential curiosity, it leads us to try new foods and new sexual partners or to climb mountains. Our thirst for novelty sometimes makes us restless, driving us to search for new jobs and new challenges. If we do not seek variation, we end up dead in life, shutting out those new experiences that keep our minds and hearts active. Our horizons will shrink, our learning will stagnate, and we will become nothing but creatures of habit.

5. Our fifth and final basic desire, altruism, includes our wish to be good and to care for others.

Most of our aspirations—whether they be material, emotional, cognitive, or spiritual—can be located within these five categories. However, each period and culture tends to value some needs more than others. Maintaining a good balance between the five basic needs is an important task not only for individuals but for societies.

There is also a frequently neglected but essential social dimension to the hero’s quest. The hero’s true function is neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others. A hero, Campbell observes, is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. The true objective of the hero is to save others.

Why should we aspire to self-knowledge in the first place? Why is it a good thing to possess? Self-knowledge directly relates to one of our five basic needs, the desire to learn. It includes learning about our own patterns, preferences, and processes. The opposite of self-knowledge is ignorance—about who we really are, our true motives, and how others may perceive us. Freud would argue that self-knowledge emancipates us from being a slave to our unconscious and its many seemingly irrational whims. Only when we know our patterns, and whence they came, can we manage and perhaps even change them. Self-knowledge, then, yields mastery and realism, as well as congruence and alignment. It is the necessary first step in initiating change. Only by taking stock of what is—in as objective a way as possible—can we truly plan what we want to change. Self-knowledge, moreover, quite simply improves our chances of making wiser life choices on a regular basis.

genuine self-knowledge can never be gained purely by theoretical introspection or reading about different models of the mind, but only through trials and tribulations, and in dialogue with others. It needs to be acquired on our own journeys—heroic or otherwise.

Control Your Mind

A modern Christian version of Stoic principles can be found in Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer. The prayer has become a core mantra in twelve-step programs such as AA: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Writers such as Napoleon Hill, who wrote the bestselling Think and Grow Rich (1937), and more recently Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret (2006), argue that our thoughts are magnetic. If we think positive thoughts, we will automatically attract positive outcomes—and vice versa: if we are gloomy pessimists, bad things will happen to us. The illusion of omnipotence that Byrne and other mystic-esoteric self-help writers promote is dangerous in many ways. According to their logic, everything bad that happens to us is entirely our fault, and that includes illnesses, assault, poverty, and other misfortunes.

Napoleon Hill’s message is simple: we can all become rich if only we want to badly enough. If we focus strongly on thoughts about money and abundance, the universe will magically resonate with our subconscious and send infinite riches our way. Success comes to those who become SUCCESS CONSCIOUS, Hill claims. TRULY, THOUGHTS ARE THINGS—and powerful things at that when they are mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a BURNING DESIRE for their translation into riches or other material objects. All we need in order to become rich is to develop a definite desire. Then our thoughts, like magnets, attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts. If we magnetize our minds and become money conscious, we will be millionaires in no time

The most widely recommended self-help manual, by contrast, is David D. Burns’s Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. It is one of the very few self-help books that is proven to have measurable and lasting positive effects on its readers

Depression attacks our self-esteem and is often accompanied by strong feelings of shame, worthlessness, and despondency. For that reason, it is one of the most insidious forms of suffering.

Positive psychology, too, advocates a form of mind control, urging us to identify negative thoughts and counterproductive beliefs about ourselves. But the emphasis is more strongly on the positive and more productive beliefs with which we should replace them. In his book Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being—and How to Achieve Them (2011), Seligman argues that there are five basic elements that enable human flourishing: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment—the initials of which form the acronym PERMA.

If we succeed in adopting a more hopeful outlook on life, less hampered by negative self-talk and core beliefs, it is simply more likely that we will also be more successful in achieving our external aims

Let It Go

Surpassed in popularity only by the Bible, Lao-tzu’s Tao te ching is the second most widely translated text in the world. Poetic in style and richly ambiguous, it teems with insights that transcend time and place. Its central theme is spiritual self-cultivation by practicing the art of letting go. In stark contrast to Confucianism’s emphasis on conformity and respect for tradition and ritual, the Tao suggests that we can improve ourselves by returning to a simpler, more authentic, and intuitive way of life.

Lao-tzu writes; he who holds will lose it. Hence the sage, because he does nothing, never ruins anything; and because he does not hold, loses nothing. . . . Hence the sage desires not to desire.

As per Tao, self-improvement is not to be achieved via exertion or determination here, but instead by yielding and acceptance, and by giving up all resistance. It is unsurprising that suppleness is one of the most celebrated qualities in the Tao: A man is supple and weak when alive, but hard and stiff when dead, according to Lao-tzu. 

Daoist self-cultivation, then, differs radically from most other models in that it does not privilege reason, willpower, and effort as pathways to growth. It is one of the first major philosophies of life that celebrates intuition, simplicity, spontaneity, creativity, and authenticity

Letting go in its highest spiritual forms is very different from the Western versions of letting go. While Daoism and Buddhism promote the idea of letting go of our worldly attachments and desires, Western-style letting go tends to be presented as a strategy for reaching our long-term goals in more flexible and creative ways. Attaining those goals, rather than loosening our attachments to them, however, remains the ultimate aim.

Be Good

In order to be happy, Aristotle writes, we must seek to fulfill our potential and actualize our highest human capacity. In order to realize our potential, we have to work on our behavior and emotional responses to become the best possible versions of ourselves. Aristotle strongly believes that we can train ourselves to be good by strengthening our virtues and controlling our vices. Aristotle considers habituation, rather than teaching and intellectual understanding, to be the primary route to moral virtue. Happiness is inextricably linked to repeated virtuous action. The only way to be a good person, he believes, is to train ourselves to do good things, repeatedly and with good intentions. But we need to want to perform these good deeds, too. They must become a natural and automatic habit.

Following Socrates and Plato, Aristotle places the virtues at the center of a well-lived life. Like his teachers, he regards the core virtues (justice, courage, temperance, and practical wisdom) as complex rational, emotional, and social skills.

Aristotle differentiates between intellectual virtues on the one hand, and moral or character virtues on the other. The intellectual virtues include theoretical and practical wisdom, science, intuitive understanding, and craft expertise. Practicing the intellectual virtues can therefore be understood not just as doing good, but also as doing something excellently. Aristotle’s core character virtues include justice (treating others fairly), courage (not shying away from doing the right thing out of cowardice or laziness), and temperance, or self-control.

Even in esoteric self-help such as Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams (1994), we can find the recommendation to give first that which we seek: if you want joy, give joy to others; if you want love, learn to give love; if you want attention and appreciation, learn to give attention and appreciation; if you want material affluence, help others to become materially affluent. In fact, the easiest way to get what you want is to help others get what they want

Be Humble

Saint Augustine called humility the foundation of all other virtues.

Studying the complex social systems of wolf packs, Radinger writes, has taught her the most valuable lessons about morality, responsibility, and love. Her mantra is thus not What Would Jesus Do (WWJD), but What Would Wolves Do (WWWD) ​​Wolves are also masters of clear and effective communication, speaking with their entire bodies. Their excellent communication skills, Radinger suggests, are the reason why they rarely fight one another Clever planning also plays a key role, for they are highly adept at cornering and leading their prey into traps. Wolves are also extremely patient and persistent, but will sensibly count their losses and withdraw when the risks entailed by pursuing their original plans prove to be too high. Finally, hunting is always a team effort, with clearly assigned roles and a strict division of labor. The lessons Radinger invites us to draw from this are obvious.

While wolves remind us of our lost wild nature and model the advantages of strong social bonds, cats have long been envied by humans for very different reasons. The French writer Stéphane Garnier’s international bestseller How to Live Like Your Cat (2017) tries to explain our age-old fascination with felines and to translate the lessons into advice about how we should live. Although he fails to provide any scientific details on feline behavior, Garnier rightly points out that the lives of cats revolve around their own well-being, and that they spend a large proportion of their time seeking comfort and pleasure. Masters of self-care, love grooming their physical appearance, sleeping, stretching, sunbathing, and playing. At heart, they are hedonists who know how to demand and take their pleasures. They are also creatures of habit who dislike changes to their treasured routines. Fiercely independent, they are nevertheless loyal. Most importantly, they are self-contained, knowing their worth and preferences, gracing others with their attention only on their own terms. Garnier does not explore this further, but this non-neediness—a form of self-sufficient sovereignty—is also the core quality that attracts us to cat-like people.

Piercing our anthropocentric fantasies of supremacy could encourage us to treat not just other species but the very planet more respectfully. Human reason is not the only good worth celebrating. After all, many animals are better than we are at something: they may be faster or fiercer; they can hear, see, or smell better; they may be better at self-care, relaxing, and bonding; and many have more stable and supportive social structures than we do. While we may want to avoid becoming misanthropic preachers of self-loathing à la Kempis, we could certainly do with bringing our self-regard down a notch, or ten. For humility is also the only effective antidote to narcissism, and all its associated evils. It is, in essence, a readiness to admit our shortcomings coupled with a willingness to learn, be that from people, animals, plants, or even machines—whoever masters something we do not. The opportunities are infinite.

Simplify

Many philosophers and religious thinkers have preached the art of ascetic living, including the Stoics and various Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, Sufi, Christian, and Jewish sects. Whether mild or extreme, all of these forms of asceticism are based on the assumption of a strong link between simplicity and spirituality. Only by controlling our worldly desires can we purify our souls and fully focus on spiritual matters. For if we remain slaves to the demands of our flesh, we remain chained to the material world. 

Japan has firmly associated with all things minimalist in the popular imagination only about a tenth of its forbidding mountainous landscapes are arable; it is susceptible to earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. In the past, the Japanese often had to take flight at a moment’s notice on account of fires, fighting, bandits, and natural disasters, carrying all of their most precious possessions with them. They have thus learned to reduce those possessions to the bare essentials

French culture, by contrast, tends to be associated with a rigorous quality-oriented approach, in particular, with regard to clothes, food, and cosmetics French writer Dominique Loreau, who has lived in Japan for decades, brings these two cultural traditions into a productive dialogue. The result is distinctly Franco-Japanese lifestyle advice. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Loreau’s core mantras are less is more and quality tops quantity. Instead of buying twenty bargain-basements, soon-to-be-discarded outfits, she suggests that we invest in one good-quality cashmere garment. The same quality-driven approach applies to all other spheres of our lives as well: to our beauty care, our mental space, friendships, and furniture. It also holds for food: we should aim to eat little and only highly nutritious and healthy foods.

Use Your Imagination

Using our imagination in the form of creative visualizations is also a crucial self-improvement technique in its own right

The famous TED talker Brené Brown considers stories to be data with a soul. Like many other successful TED talkers, Brown knows that stories can reach not just our minds, but also our hearts, and as such are a highly effective means for building a connection with others. Moreover, they switch on specific areas in our brains. Merely factual information tends to activate our language-processing centers. Stories, by contrast, stimulate much larger areas in our brains, including not just the language center but also those parts that are responsible for visual and motor processing, as well as our sensory cortex. Stories can activate our mirror neurons, allowing us to imagine ourselves in a particular situation, doing something specific. They can also trigger hormonal responses in our brains: our adrenalin and cortisol production might be stimulated by narratives that evoke fear, for example, whereas stories appealing to our compassion and empathy can result in higher emissions of dopamine and oxytocin. All of this matters. Via this kind of imaginary experiential immersion, stories can prompt strong emotional states. These, in turn, can affect our moral responses and even alter our attitudes

In the secular age, religion can no longer deliver on its promise of redemption. Art, philosophy, literature, and music must take their place. Culture must take over the sense-making work of Scripture. It is only the products of our imagination that can save us from the specter of nihilism and anomie, Nietzsche argues.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra written by Nietzsche is a work that can be read as a self-help parable. Its protagonist, a prophet called Zarathustra, having lived as a hermit and in complete seclusion for many years, decides to descend from his mountain and to teach the people his doctrine of the Übermensch, or superhuman. He tells us to strive to rise above our human limitations, to aim higher, and to dream bigger.

He defines superman in the following terms:

I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man?

What is the ape to men? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall the man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. . . .

Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman—a rope over an abyss

In the West today, hyperindividualism reigns supreme. Self-realization is one of our most cherished aspirations, and creativity and uniqueness are exalted. In other words, they are now firmly inscribed in our own tables of values. Therefore, the old tables of values can technically no longer be smashed by embracing these now commonly accepted, indeed mainstream, values. Cherishing the imagination and its products today is neither rebellious nor countercultural. Ironically, to be truly original and imaginative today, we would have to challenge these very values.

Persevere

Fortitude entails a steadfastness of purpose combined with courage—more precisely, the courage not to allow adversity to turn us away from our goals. We might now describe this quality as perseverance. Perseverance denotes our ability to continue with a task even in the face of obstacles or setbacks. We might also speak of resilience, tenacity, drive, and resolve. Grit and growth mindsets are other more recent framings that capture our capacity to keep going in spite of repeated disappointments. But perseverance is also connected to two ethically more complex notions: willpower and effort

The psychologist Carol S. Dweck has coined the notion of the growth mindset—the belief in our ability to learn and to develop our skills. This mindset, she argues, has a crucial impact on our capacity to evolve. It entails stretching ourselves, seeking challenges, persevering, and learning from failure. Many other psychologists emphasize the importance of learning from failure as a key determiner of persistent improvement

Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People describes his own method as a principle-centered, character-based, ‘inside-out’ approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness. Quoting Aristotle, Covey emphasizes that we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. As his title indicates, habits are powerful routines that determine how successful we are in our lives. Because habits are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character and produce our effectiveness . . . or ineffectiveness. Covey understands habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. In other words, habits determine what we do, how we do it, and our basic motives.

Like Peck and Peterson, Covey, too, believes in discipline. Discipline, he reminds us, comes from disciple—disciple to a philosophy, disciple to a set of principles, disciple to a set of values, disciple to an overriding purpose, to a superordinate goal or a person who represents that goal. If we are effective managers of ourselves, our discipline will come from within

The most reasonable conclusion is arguable that we should take a measured and humble kaizen approach to our own improvement, valuing gradual and incremental change for the better, however small that change may be.

Mentalize

Key to Carnegie’s (How to Win Friends and Influence People fame) method is the art of mentalizing—that is, stepping into the other person’s shoes, trying to see the world from their point of view, and mobilizing empathy.

According to Machiavelli (the author of ‘The Prince’), it is generally safer to be feared than loved. This is because human beings are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed, they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children.

As shameless everyday Machiavellians, for example, we might do the following: Above all, we would strive to appear to be kind and always pay lip service to the virtues of the day, even when, out of the public eye, we would be prepared ruthlessly to defend our position of power. Although extremely image-conscious and concerned with what people think of us, we would not aspire to goodness as a value in itself. Instead, we would live by the idea that effectiveness is the best measure of success, and that success trumps goodness every time. 

Those of us in leadership positions would ensure that our colleagues are sufficiently loyal and happy that they do not rebel against us; we would reward achievement and try to keep people on our side. At the same time, we would make it known that disloyalty will be punished. We would surround ourselves with good people, but not with people who are more accomplished than we are and who could become rivals. We would make decisions swiftly and confidently, not hesitating to throw former friends under the bus, and always keep an eye on which side our bread is buttered. We would never apologize, fiercely attack anyone who dares to criticize us and seek to destroy their reputation rather than engage with the content of their criticism. The Machiavellian model, in short, might be effective if our sole aim is power, but is not to be emulated if we wish to sleep soundly at night.

Another self-improvement genre that enjoyed a surge in popularity in the early modern period is courtesy literature. Courtesy literature teaches courtiers good manners and morals, with a new focus not only on social etiquette but also on the more superficial aspects of human interactions such as witty chat and sharp dressing. The most famous examples of the genre include Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) and Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo: The Rules of Polite Behavior (1558).

Castiglione places a special emphasis on the importance of entertaining and elegant speech needed for courtiers. Eloquence requires knowledge, wit, a smooth flow of information, as well as current and nonpretentious diction. Witty and stylish speech should be peppered with well-turned metaphors and accompanied by certain movements of the entire body, not affected or violent but tempered by an agreeable expression of the face and movement of the eyes giving grace and emphasis to what is said

Personality became the new cornerstone for self-improvement. Personal charisma and the powers of persuasion became increasingly essential skills that people needed to possess in order to thrive in the new economic order. 

Carnegie also advises us to praise rather than criticize if we wish to change other people’s behavior Another important component of the art of persuasion is to secure attention and vividly dramatize our ideas: You have to use showmanship, Carnegie urges. The movies do it. Television does it. And you will have to do it if you want attention. This advice is endorsed still today, for example by the journalist and communication expert Carmine Gallo, author of Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds

In Instant Influence and Charisma (2015), the British hypnotist Paul McKenna outlines various concrete strategies for boosting our charisma and our power to influence others. ​​If we want others to like and trust us, we need above all to reduce our difference by amplifying what we have in common. This includes aligning our physiology with that person—echoing posture, gestures, speed of movement, even the pace, tone, and volume of our conversation partner’s speech. Blatant copying, however, is to be avoided in favor of subtler forms of mirroring. McKenna, too, advises us to pay close attention to other people’s metaphors and styles of expression. We should also seek to ask questions aimed at finding out what their core values and beliefs are, and then respect these.

At the heart of Machiavelli’s, Castiglione’s, Carnegie’s, and McKenna’s advice, however, resides a very simple lesson: if we want anything at all from others—be that simple to be liked, or to achieve other, more specific outcomes such as being feared, securing favors, exerting influence, or selling something—we need to take the people with whom we interact seriously. We must grace them with genuine attention. We must listen to what they say and to how they say it, understand what they want and ​​fear most, and communicate in a language that is similar to theirs. We must, in other words, mentalize.

It is, finally, also simply a very hard truth to know others. While Carnegie’s belief that appreciation is what all of us want most is certainly true to an extent, it does not capture the complexities and nuances of our many other needs. It is hard—very hard—to imagine what others really want, not least because they often don’t know themselves.

Be Present

In essence, mindfulness is about relearning how to live in the here and now. It encourages us to direct our attention fully and nonjudgmentally to whatever task we are currently performing. It asks us to cultivate our ability to focus on the present by training our minds not to flit feverishly from our past to our futures, chasing after every thought, however trivial. Rather than getting lost in the content of our thoughts, it asks us to become aware of their movement. At its apex, mindfulness resonated with so many of us because we clearly felt we had lost the ability to live fully in the present moment.

Seven mental attitudes are additional core pillars of mindfulness practice. They are non-judging, patience, a beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go

The outcomes of mindfulness meditation are unpredictable. We may well become less stressed and more focused, but what we do with our enhanced energy is by no means predetermined. We may become more productive and add more value to the companies for which we work, or we may gain the courage to quit our jobs, or finally to confront difficult bosses and demand changes in our organization. 

If there is a lesson in all this, it is that self-improvement matters enormously, not just at the level of the individual life but at that of society as a whole.​​As the long history of self-improvement demonstrates, changing ourselves can take many forms, some more suited to achieving a fair and just society than others. Today’s self-help industry is one of those forms. But it, too, is multifarious. Knowingly or unknowingly, it draws on a long and vibrant tradition and articulates in new ways the ten abiding themes of the ancient art of self-improvement.