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Misleading Advice

“Get a little better each day.” 

Obvious… right? I’m not so sure.

We’re obsessed with self-improvement. 

I was at a wedding for a good friend over the weekend. 

The bride’s side was Russian. 
So half the women there looked like models. 

I’m talking with one of them. 
📖 She’s telling me about their book club. 

I ask what they’re reading. 

“This book on negotiation.”

She shows me the Amazon listing. 
And this book looks serious. 

(Sorry, I don’t remember what it was.) 

They read a book on self-improvement every month. 

Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s awesome. 🙌🏽
Heck, you’re likely reading this to improve. 

💎 But here’s the thing: 

Self-improvement gets less valuable as you do more of it. In economic terms it has “diminishing marginal returns.” 

We get confused because the analogies we use for self-improvement often come from domains like sports. After all, in competitive spheres like football or warfare, you DO need to keep improving yourself. 

You are in direct competition, and those games are zero-sum.

But those games are very different from the games most people play. For one thing, they are limited in how much you can build the secret sauce of capitalism: 

Assets. 

Sliding Doors

Let’s do a thought experiment. 

Josh and Judy both have dreams to become wealthy and free. 

They are both 25 years old and are well educated. They’re in the same field: product management (a field I know well). 

Josh spends 25% of his time on self-improvement. He consistently works on his craft as a PM. 

He works diligently the next 20 years for top tech companies like Initech and Initrode, knowing one day he’ll make enough money to retire. 

Josh constantly adds skills and abilities to his repertoire so that he can become a Chief Product Officer one day. 

Judy, on the other hand, leaves Initrode at 25 years old and starts a company. 

You’re thinking, “Okay, dude, of course your example is that she starts some unicorn company and voila, she wins the money race.” 

Nope, Judy starts a coffee shop. 

Now you’re thinking, “That’s the dumbest idea ever. It’s not Zero to One! What about barriers to entry?!” 

But Judy tells all of you to f— off and starts it anyway. 

Judy is not focused on improving herself. 

❌ She builds very few skills.
❌ She doesn’t keep up with AI. 
❌ She’s not subscribed to a dozen newsletters and podcasts to “keep her finger on the pulse” of the industry. 

What a loser, am I right?!!! 

Except…

Judy creates a warm space with reasonably skilled baristas and unique charm. 

Rather than improving herself, she improves it—the coffee shop—a little each day. 

Within three years, she’s opened a second location. 
Then she adds lunch and wine. 

She hires managers and develops strong process. 

You already know how this ends. 

By the time they’re both 45, Josh has been grinding away underappreciated for his entire career. He’s been “building skills” but has been operating way below his potential. He’s the most disciplined mother— you’ve ever seen. And “one day” someone will trust him enough to give him real responsibility. 🙄

Meanwhile, Judy has built a portfolio of assets that work for her. She’s not worried about improving herself, because she’s busy improving her life. 

She does this by working every day on the machine that makes money for her. She’s been reading fantasy novels since the old Initrode days. She doesn’t even know who Ryan Holiday is. 

In the end, Josh’s effort was noble but misplaced. 

Enough is Enough

The real solution of course is to work on both of these things: yourself and your assets. 

But for many of us, self-improvement is an obsession.  

We convince ourselves that there’s some secret we’re going to unlock that magically gets us everything we wanted. But in the end, we’re just stuck in a doom loop and using self-improvement as an avoidance mechanism.

And at some point, you’ve improved enough. 
“Enough” at least to get the results you want. 

If you’ve plateaued—at least in business, the issue is not that you’re: 

❌ not talented enough 
❌ not skilled enough 
❌ not smart enough 

The problem is where and how you’re applying your effort. 

You could castigate yourself for not hydrating enough or snoozing the alarm at 5am. 

Or you could just keep working on your main asset: a machine that does work for you. 

By that definition, we illuminate one reason we’re all so confused about this topic. Because career counselors and pop culture have ingrained in us that our skills are our greatest assets. 

This is nonsense. By that reasoning, the word “asset” has no special significance from “skills” or “valuable qualities.” Yet Amazon stock is clearly an asset—but not a skill or a valuable personal trait. Meanwhile, being honest is desirable, but does anyone argue that it’s an asset?

Rise of the Machines

So how do we make sense of this?

A better definition of an asset is something that pays you in the future. 

If you keep working on yourself, then you’re getting better at producing results through your own direct labor (i.e. your time spent on something). But in a capitalist system, the goal is not to get paid a better hourly rate every year until we die. 

The goal of most educated people is to amass things that make money for you—while you lie on the beach in Antigua with your new Russian girlfriend. 

You can build that money-making machine with whatever your skills are today. And if you do that every day, you’ll create a great machine with limited self-improvement. 

Stop spending so much time improving yourself. 

Improve a machine. 

❤️ Andrew

PS. Whether you’re stuck in a self-help spiral or trying to scale your asset, I can help. More info on my coaching is available here. 

Outro

“Machinehead” by Bush:

Cheers

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