I like this recent theme in your writing, Charles, of reconsidering traditional ideas and assumptions around self-improvement.

It’s something I think about a lot because I both write about the topic myself, but also because in my professional field clinical psychology there are still a lot of unanswered questions about individual differences in change.

Even our best, most effective and well-studied interventions (psychological and pharmacological) are not actually all that robust or effective on a whole.

I think this is true in the personal development world too: There are plenty of good ideas out there, with plenty of people who have benefited from them, but they don’t seem to work all that well for most people.

I suspect we’re not going to make much progress here until we start taking a more critical inward look at the field itself and all its assumptions.