You might believe that one day, you’ll finally make it in life.

You’ll have enough money in your bank account. You’ll have the greatest physique of your life. You’ll be the happiest you’ve ever been. Doesn’t this all sound a bit foolish to you?

While there’s nothing wrong with striving to be better, when is this magical “one day” going to happen in reality?

In self-help circles, you’re fed the message of how you need to constantly improve yourself and aim for more in life. I’m not against that idea. After all, this newsletter is about self-improvement.

However, this message comes with a hidden warning.

That one day will never happen as long as you continue moving the goalposts of success, like most people do.

You have to wonder when you’ll ever allow yourself to be satisfied with your life, since there’ll always be more unrealised potential within you. There’ll always be some more distance to cover. You can always move a bit closer to that mystical finish line.

It can feel like we’re hopelessly running on a treadmill sometimes. We work harder and harder to get closer to success while simultaneously raising the bar for what we even consider success. And we can never be happy until we succeed. It’s such a futile effort.

All we’re doing without realising it is seeking perfection.

If we’re not aware of this, we’ll continue playing this silly game until death, and then no doubt we’ll have “made it”, but neglected our lives along the way. You have to ask yourself when you’ll start living then, when you’ll be content for once.

Right now or at some random point in the future that may never come?

Here are three ideas for you to think about to escape this treadmill:

Life isn’t about climbing mountains all the time.

There’s a saying that goes you are a human being, not a human doing.

You have to take a step back from your busy life more often and just appreciate that you’re here right now on this Earth. You weren’t put onto the world to be a non-stop working machine (or to do nothing at all either of course).

Your existence isn’t validated by how much work you do, especially since not all your efforts actually move you forward.

While it’s sad to imagine spending your whole life lying on a couch all day doing nothing, it’s even more tragic to imagine being so caught up in your work for the sake of a goal, and to forget that work isn’t why you’re here in the first place.

You’re just here. We all are. So enjoy life a bit more while you can.

You’re never going to make it to the perfect reality you dream of anyways, so you might as well stop being so obsessed with it, and stop allowing it to rob you of your happiness in the present moment.

Take breaks from work. It’s depressing how the thought of that sounds insane to some people, but you really do yourself more harm than good when you never hit the brakes. Of course, this means actual relaxation as well, not scrolling feeds or bingewatching a TV series.

Life isn’t about climbing mountains all the time. It’s about living. There will always be more mountains anyways. You can’t climb them all.

Define the end point. There’s no need to settle for it.

I love self-improvement.

One problem I have though is that some days, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. I tell myself I “just need to improve” but I don’t even know what I want my future life to look like.

You might have a similar problem too.

You keep on working and working, and it all just seems so pointless. You don’t know whether you’re even moving forward, where you’re moving, or where you want to go in the first place.

I call this problem the infinite goal.

It’s when you have no clear end point you want to reach. You just keep on marching blindly towards a random position in a foggy future. You can never be happy since you don’t know whether you’re even making progress in the first place.

Success doesn’t exist since you don’t allow it to. You haven’t defined it.

You have to define a clear end point for yourself, a clear finish line, or else you’ll just keep on moving pointlessly. Having a clear end point allows you to celebrate more. It allows you to feel good knowing you’re certainly making progress since you know where you’re going.

Of course, you’re not limited to the end point.

You can go further if you want to, and really you should. If you don’t have an end point though, you’ll be unhappy and without a sense of direction. You’ll never be able to feel accomplished or appreciate small wins because the whole journey just seems so grand.

What you need is a balance.

You need a balance between the two extremes of insane improvement (which keeps you unhappy and unclear), and pure laziness (which moves you nowhere).

This idea is helpful to remember:

Don’t aim for perfection.
Don’t tolerate mediocrity.

Don’t do nothing at all. If you want to improve your life, that’s obvious. Don’t make your whole life about doing stuff and achieving more either. If you want to be happy, that should be obvious.

In the end, what really matters isn’t external success. It’s internal success – having a calm, content mind. If you spend your whole life fighting a war in which you’re so obsessed with improving yourself, you’ll never be able to achieve that.

The most powerful thing you can do is to come to peace with yourself and end the war.

Allow yourself to be happy now, because you never know when your last time to do so will come. Allow yourself to feel accomplished now even if you’re not there yet, and you’ve just made a bit of progress. Allow yourself to slow down, because you don’t exist solely to work.

As great as it is to have a self-improver’s mindset, when it’s uncontrolled, it ironically ruins your life rather than improving it.