3 Journal Questions to Keep You on the Path of Continuous Improvement
These questions will push you to improve even when you don’t feel like it
I’ve reached a point in my life when I can confidently say “I’m happy”.
In fact, this is the happiest I’ve been in my entire life. However, don’t get me wrong. Even when I say “I’m happy”, it doesn’t mean that I no longer experience pain and struggle. I still do and that will continue for as long as I live.
And that’s the struggle I’m currently facing: what do I do next?
I’m sure you’ve already heard people say “there’s always a higher mountain to climb”. That is true. The climbing never ends.
While that may sound tiring, it’s actually what’s going to keep you going.
When you’ve achieved mastery or managed to hit the highest goal you can achieve, there’s no more reason to keep going.
This is why a lot of uber-successful people go through depression. They’ve done super amazing things in such a short amount of time that the game of life to them is now boring. The longer the boredom, the more reasons they have to consider quitting it.
Now, I’m no uber-successful but I’m happy.
However, that happiness also leads to complacency. When I’m complacent, I don’t grow. And if I’m not growing, then perhaps I’m also dying…not physically but spiritually.
To get me out of that cycle, I needed to find a way to force myself to grow.
This understanding was my key to applying the concept of kaizen — the Japanese word for continuous improvement — to my daily life.
The more I learn, the more I expose myself to the possibilities and different “life paths” Life has to offer me.
Question 1 — What did I learn yesterday?
“You learn something new every day” sounds cliché because a lot of times, it doesn’t feel that way.
What I used to consider a “lesson” is something that can drastically change the way I think and view life. However, this mindset blinds me from noticing the random lessons I learn each day. I’m talking about non-life-changing insights that come from a conversation, a book, a YouTube video or simply by scrolling through your social media feeds.
An example of this is when I gain random lessons or stories from reading a book. In this instance, I learned about the Gordian Knot. The story is not going to change my life, but the act of sharing the story with others will. When you share (let’s say a party or online), you create a connection with others who resonate with it.
That random story or lesson serves as an opening to new relationships.
In my career, it’s also as simple as learning a new Excel formula. Learning one formula isn’t going to do much. But, regardless of how simple the formula is, I’m sure it will come in handy someday.
Not everything you learn can be applied right away.
The whole point of this question is to push me to pay attention to each moment of my daily life and realize how Life is helping me to continuously improve as an individual.
Question 2 — What little adjustments can I apply today to improve?
This question was inherited by James Altucher’s 1% rule.
The goal of this question is to push me to think of the smallest thing I can do to make me feel like I’m better than who I was yesterday. The idea is that when these small improvements stack up, they will improve my life significantly.
Much like building a muscle, it takes consistent effort to make the change permanent.
An example is when I decided to temporarily ignore my egocentric thoughts for at least five minutes. These are bad thoughts that make you think “the world is against me”. Those five minutes may be a short time, but it’s all I need to stop myself from going down the rabbit hole of feeling like a useless individual.
Now, if I could turn that into a habit, my life would be much less stressful.
Question 3— What existential questions do I need to explore to direct my life path?
These are hard-to-answer questions I ask myself to force me to live more mindfully.
“The quality of your life is a direct reflection of the quality of the questions you are asking yourself”
― Anthony Robbins
I ask myself…
“What is it about me that people find valuable, so much that they would pay for it?”
“What does writing do for me? Why am I writing online? What’s the point?!”
“If I lose my job today, what can I do to financially support my family?”
“If I had only 5 more years to live, how would I spend my day today?”
“What do I see myself doing in 30 years?”
I don’t answer these questions in my journal simply because they require a lot of thinking. But that’s the whole point of asking them: to reassess my current life path. As I grow older, my goals and wants evolve with it. Asking myself existential questions reminds me that I have a purpose in life. And sometimes, they open new possibilities.
They serve as a compass to set a life path according to my own evolution.
Shout out to J.R. Spiers for continuously writing about chickens, which, gives me a dose of good feeling whenever I’m browsing for stuff to read on this platform.
