In Defense of Radical Self-Betterment

Hi! Dan here. Every once in a while I run into a writer who creates a piece so comprehensive, so well-thought out, and so full of insights that I’m jealous, because I wish I was smart enough to have been able to write it myself.

This essay by Dr. Gena Gorlin is exactly that kind of piece. Dr. Gorlin is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Austin, and if you’re a founder, or a builder looking to embark on a journey of self-transformation—this is the definitive place to start. I’m jealous—but I’m also immensely proud that we get to publish it. Enjoy!

One of the most satisfying parts of my job as therapist and coach is getting to “catch” my clients in personality changes that have become so second-nature as to escape their notice. 

Like when I’m sitting with a client who perpetually doubted her own judgment and sought constant reassurance at the start of our work together, and, 6 months in, I notice her expressing mild annoyance that her colleagues haven’t yet come around to her independently formed view of a prospective hire. 

Or when, a year into working with a narcissistic patient who felt aggrieved by everyone in the world and never admitted fault under any circumstances, he spontaneously takes ownership of his role in fueling a conflict of which the other guy was the far more obvious instigator. 

When I point out these changes, my clients’ eyes often widen, followed by a quiet half-smile of recognition and a musing to the effect of, “wow, yeah, that would’ve never even occurred to old me…”

What delights and impresses me about these moments is that I’ve gotten to witness the evolution that led to them: the imperceptibly gradual turning of the flywheel by which a client has diligently pried away old perspectives and ways of doing things and effortfully laid down new ones, again and again, in circumstance after circumstance, through setback after setback, until finally the new ones had seeped far and wide enough into the foundations of their psyche to have become the new default. 

What I’m describing here is not mere habit change or mere attitude change; I’m talking about deep, enduring character change. The kind of change that runs against our grain, that defies all our psychological defaults, that only happens through an unrelenting, deliberate campaign of radical self-betterment. 

I’m talking about the kind of change undertaken by radical-Islamist-turned-global-peace-activist Maajid Nawaz, who narrates his evolution from fighting for the violent overthrow of America to advocating for a “secular Islam.” His account reflects the kind of honest reckoning he has had to do with his previous self, whom he describes, for instance, as “[spreading] the very prejudice I claimed I was fighting.” 

I’m talking about the kind of change exemplified by luminary psychologist Marsha Linehan, who details her journey from spending 21 months in a psychiatric hospital isolation ward due to severe, intractable Borderline Personality Disorder, to pioneering the world’s first and most widely renowned scientifically-based treatment for same—in a memoir aptly titled Building a Life Worth Living. 

I’m talking about the kind of change by which Steve Jobs transformed himself from a “reckless upstart” into a “visionary leader” in the years after getting fired from his own company—a story told, not by Jobs himself, but by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli in their diligently researched biography Becoming Steve Jobs. 

It is instructive that Schlender and Tetzeli wrote their biography partly as a corrective for the “one-dimensional myths about Steve” as an “unchanging half-genius, half-asshole from birth” that were “ossifying in the public mind” after his death. I suspect this discrepancy between Jobs’ public persona and his private story of self-transformation illustrates a broader cultural phenomenon: stories of radical self-betterment are hard to come by, not because they are rare, but because they are rarely told. It takes far less effort and imagination to depict a static “half-hero / half-villain” figure—an easily pictured archetype in the tradition of Jeckyll and Hyde—than to piece together the complex, winding, idiosyncratic, often unglamorous struggle by which a person chisels away at his or her own character over time.  

As a therapist and coach for ambitious founders and other “upstarts,” I’ve both witnessed and lived that struggle in its many forms and iterations. I know how excruciatingly hard, and also profoundly rewarding, it can be. And I know it’s not limited to high-profile, larger-than-life personalities like Nawaz, Linehan, and Jobs. 

But I contend it should be more common still. 

This is not to say everyone should always be focused on radically bettering themselves (see “The case against radical self-betterment” below for some reasons not to focus on it). Like any ambitious project you might take on, the work of radical self-betterment is too costly to undertake without good reason. Nawaz, Linehan, and Jobs all underwent their self-transformations out of what they would have probably described as necessity: the necessity of resolving painful, even deadly contradictions in his approach to life, in Nawaz’s case; of finding a reason to stay alive, in Linehan’s case; of fulfilling his creative and aesthetic vision for the technologies he loved, in Jobs’ case. And each of them prioritized the changes that were mission-critical to achieving these aims, while learning to accept or compensate for character flaws that were less mission-critical. 

The reason to care about your character is not because you need to prove anything to anyone, but because your character is your ultimate instrument for enacting the kind of life you want. So keep it as sharp as it needs to be in order to serve your chosen aims—and don’t obsess over the dull bits a minute longer than your aims demand. 

If you do choose radical self-betterment as your path, what follows is a step-by-guide that will help you along your journey from start to finish.

Step 1: Articulate your vision

The first step to determining whether and how you want to change is not necessarily to start listing out problems or deficits you wish you didn’t have, though this may seem like the intuitive starting point. Rather, I suggest starting with a clear positive vision of what you really want out of your life, supposing psychological barriers weren’t an issue. Really take some time to envision your ideal case scenario. The kinds of exercises in this Life Vision Worksheet, which I’ve assembled and adapted from the much larger toolkit of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) values clarification exercises (see a sampling here), can be quite helpful. Questions to ask yourself include: What do you long to experience, and with whom? What kind of work would you find most fulfilling? Where, how, with whom, and at what scale would you ideally be doing that work? What do you yearn for most deeply in your relationships, your friendships, your home, your family life? What would be your happiest and proudest reminiscences about the life you’ve lived, when you’re 120 years old and writing your memoirs? What sort of mark would you most want to have left on the world, and on the loved ones who carry on your legacy?

Don’t hold back when answering these questions. If you feel a sense of trepidation, anxiety, even guilt or sadness when certain possibilities occur to you, those are good signs that you might be onto something. 

In addition to any concrete outcomes you already know you want to include in your ideal life vision (like “have at least one kid” or “write a book”), make sure you also identify the kinds of activities or experiences you want your life to be chock full of—at whatever level of description you can specify them. These are like general “directions of travel” rather than discrete milestones along your journey, and they are what psychologists typically refer to as “values.” 

For instance, I know I’ll always value “building intimate, mutually inspiring emotional connections with smart, ambitious people.” This has been a common denominator in many of the activities and interactions I’ve found most rewarding throughout my life, from therapy and coaching to academic mentoring to romance. I don’t know all the exact milestones I’ll need to hit in order to continue reaping these rewards throughout my life, but I know some of the character-building challenges I’ll need to navigate—such as saying “no” to an ever-widening range of professional demands that eat into my time pursuing this value, or cultivating a network of increasingly impressive people without getting intimidated or distracted from my purpose. 

Once you’ve articulated some of your own core values, it might help to boil them down into a “personal mission statement”—a short phrase or image that sums up the essence of what you’re after in your life as succinctly and vividly as possible. This "personal mission statement" should quickly remind you, at a visceral emotional level, of the “truth North” you are pursuing, even through whatever difficult changes you need to make along the way.

For instance, my personal mission statement for many years has been “inspiring and empowering ambitious self-creation”—a purpose that animates me when I’m at my best, not only in my work, but in my marriage, parenting, friendships, and most private reveries. 

While we can only guess at what Steve Jobs’ personal mission statement might have been, if he had one, some recurring and idiosyncratically Jobs-ian themes do readily suggest themselves: the mission to extend the reach of human agency by building “a bicycle for the mind,” for example, and even more fundamentally, to “make a dent in the universe”; or the advice he famously gave to the graduating class at Stanford to “stay hungry, stay foolish.” It is not hard to imagine how some mix of these iconic statements might have resounded in his own head and urged him to keep growing in pursuit of his insatiable hunger and "foolish" idealism—even when it meant reckoning with his own deficiencies as a leader, and, ultimately, making a big dent in his own character in order to do it. Indeed, the Becoming Steve Jobs biography quotes Jobs’ long-time friend Edwin Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and later President of Walt Disney Animation Studios, reflecting on how the profound changes in Jobs’ character over the years were intimately intertwined with his vision for the world: “I look at Steve as someone who was actually always trying to change, but he didn’t express it in the same ways as others, and he didn’t communicate with people about that. He really was trying to change the world. It didn’t come across as him being personally introspective.” 

As to Linehan, she vowed early on, while still hospitalized and dealing with sometimes irresistible urges to cut herself, that “I would get myself out of hell—and that once I did, I would find a way to get others out of hell, too.” Of course she knew very little at the time about the details of her long, circuitous journey toward realizing that mission, or that it would eventually materialize into a goal of “develop[ing] a behavior therapy that would help highly suicidal people live lives worth living.” Yet that original vow, she writes, “has controlled most of my life,” giving it the purpose and direction she would eventually help so many people find for themselves. 

Step 2: Identify plausible paths to ideal life vision 

Now, what might it realistically take to realize your ideal life vision, in whole or in part? Obviously you won’t know the path in every detail, and there will almost always be multiple alternative paths you could consider. But usually there are probable steps and milestones you can identify, at least to some moderate level of specificity. 

This is easier for some paths than others, of course: for instance, if you want to become a doctor, the path is fairly well-defined, at least to a point. If you want to become a writer or an entrepreneur, the path is much less “set,” with almost infinite permutations on how you could get there and in what form you could pursue it. But there are certain broad elements you can specify even just in virtue of this indeterminateness: for instance, you’ll need to get comfortable with risk; you’ll need to learn to navigate highly uncertain decisions and environments; you’ll need to get good at communicating and pitching ideas; you’ll need to develop a network of fellow travelers and potential collaborators.

Here again, don’t be too quick to rule out a given path because it seems too implausible or psychologically costly for you. You’ll be better equipped to make this determination once you’ve reviewed steps 3-5 below. 

Step 3: Identify change targets

Having thought through the potential path(s) to your ideal life vision, ask yourself: is there anything I could realistically be doing to get on this path, or to speed or improve my progress along this path, if my psychology worked differently than it does now?