This is a long story. The “Tl;dr” is at the bottom.

Let me tell you guys the story of Joe, Average. Joe is a university student. However, his story applies to more than that demographic.

One day Joe was fed up of his current position in life and started looking for ways to improve it. He stumbled upon TRP. He started frantically consuming TRP material. He soon learned that he should

Start lifting

Change his diet

Practice mediating

Start journaling

Practice/ find his hobbies

Do well in his major

Create/re-create a social circle that adds value to him

Continue consuming TRP material and other related literature

Thus Joe embarked on his self-improving journey. Thinking that all he had to do was force him to do all of the above. He was miserably mistaken and after a couple of days realized it. Joe started becoming frustrated if he skipped an activity that he thought he must do – let’s say lifting- then he started becoming worried and stressed about the potential of him skipping an activity due to “ there is not enough time” or “ there is too much to do” or “ this other activity took much more time than expected.” Therefore, Joe –slowly but surely- started abandoning each of his newly found activities and in time his entire self-improvement journey and reverted back to his previous ways with some but insignificant improvements.

After some time, Joe – once again- got fed-up of his current position in life and opened the TRP again and embarked or re-embarked on his self-improving journey. Then he once again felt overwhelmed, stressed, worried and incompetent and thus reverted to his previous ways.

Needless to say this cycle kept repeating itself.

One day, something new happened. Joe, in his despair, googled “how to make a day have more than 24 hours” This is where he stumbled upon the concepts of “prioritizing”, “optimization” and “productivity”. It is also when he realized that the problem was not that a day only had 24 hours but it was that he put too much on his plate, or more precisely, too much novel things on his plate.

Therefore, Joe decided to “prioritize” the activities. He decided that to HIM the most important activities were excelling in his major, lifting, mediating and journaling. Then Joe decided to “optimize” his priorities, as in do them in the most “productive” way possible to HIM. Finding a new direction, Joe started working towards his goal – optimizing his priorities.

After a considerable amount of time, Joe started seeing some but not adequate progress and started feeling less but still significant amounts of stress and all the related negative feelings. Thus Joe took things back to the drawing board, and that’s where he realized that he had two options and only two options- this time reverting back to the old ways was not a possibility since Joe felt progress. Either take something off his plate, or devote more time and dedication to his journey. He chose the latter. Although Joe chose the latter, he knows that the former is not a wrong choice and did choose it on some occasions.

After some more considerable time, Joe was comfortable with how he optimized his priorities, and decided that he had enough free time to add another activity. Thus he did just that, and the process repeated itself.

After some hefty amount of time, Joe optimized all of the activities he decided to start when he first visited TRP.

And now Chad Thundercock, previously known as Average Joe is satisfied and is a role model for others.

TL;dr: Don’t dive in too deep. Prioritize your activities, then optimize the selected few, then repeat.Otherwise you will fall in an infinite self-depreciating loop.