Types of Problems in Self-Improvement

Before I will continue my elaboration about better self-development methods I need to tackle a very important question:

What problems do people face?

I will answer it in this post.

Levels of Problems

I split people’s problems into three levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced. The higher the level is, the more complicated solutions are required and hence classic self-development methods have a bigger chance of failure.

Beginner Problems

Beginner Problems are problems which are easy to solve by using existing self-development methods.

What exact problems do I call beginner’s problems?

Procrastination Problem: People don’t even start

This is surprising how many people don’t even start to change in the desired direction.

Reasons of the problem

• High mental complexity (difficulty) of the new activity (not chunking problem into small enough parts)

• Desired action is too demotivating (e.i. pain of doing exercises or fear of reaching out to people)

• Lack of starting prompt - there is never a good occasion to start the change (this is why New Year is where most people start doing something because this is that rare good occasion)

Possible solutions of the problem

• Static Methods (e.i. daily creation of tasks and marking them at the end of the day in some place; or marking habits done everyday).

• Environmental methods can also work if possible (e.i. finding a friend struggling with the same issue and starting working out on it together).

A flash in the pan Problem: Quick burn out

People stop what they started just after a few days or weeks.

Reasons of the problem

• Huge difficulty of the new activity (the change wasn’t made small enough)

• Desired action is too demotivating (e.i. pain of doing exercises or fear of reaching out to people)

• Lack of reminders (people just tend to forget that they were supposed to do something)

Possible solutions of the problem

• Static Methods (e.i. daily creation of tasks and marking them at the end of the day; or marking habits done everyday).

• Environmental Methods can also work if possible (e.i. finding a friend struggling with the same issue and starting working out on it together).

Intermediate Problems

As I already wrote, not many people overcame beginner’s problems and had the opportunity to experience other problems that were just hidden from sight.

Intermediate Problems are problems that are quite challenging to tackle using existing Self-Development methods but it’s still doable with a moderate effort.

Scaling Labour Problem

People fail to scale activity. For example, person created a habit of doing 10 push-ups but later doesn’t make any progress (more push-ups, more frequent push-ups etc.) - just sticking to the habit that is less and less valuable over time.

Reasons of the problem

• Complexity of defining how expected labor should change over time

Possible solutions of the problem

• Environmental methods can work if possible (e.i. mentor/coach that will tell that more the person needs to work more)

• Lean Methods (e.i. gym plans: one plan is applied for 6 weeks, then there needs to be review what a new plan should be chosen and then a new 6 week cycle starts)

• Dynamic Methods

Performance Problem

People successfully developed a process but they failed to improve its quality. For example, a person created a habit of doing 10 push-ups but over time this activity started to be careless as opposed to doing better push ups or different types of push ups.

Reasons of the problem

• Complexity

Possible solutions of the problem

• Environmental methods can work if possible (e.i. mentor/coach that will tell that more the person needs do better job)

• Lean Methods (e.i. gym plans: one plan is applied for 6 weeks, then there needs to be review what new plan should be chosen and then new 6 week cycle starts)

• Dynamic Methods

Decision Problems (Conflicts between different processes in life)

People are able to generate desired processes in their life but struggle to decide which has the most priority. Not everything good in life can be done. There is a high difficulty to make a good decision about what to do and what to not do.

Reasons of the problem

• Complexity

Possible solutions of the problem

• Environmental methods can work if possible (e.i. mentor/coach that will tell help to find out what is more important and what is less significant)

• Lean Methods (e.i. frequent review of plans and work based on a new information)

• Dynamic Methods

Advanced Problems

Advanced Problems are even more complicated to manage than the intermediate problems. It’s difficult to find really successful examples where in personal development these types of problems were fixed. Of course this is still possible but solutions can’t be applied generally.

Optimization Problems

These are higher level problems where people want to keep the quality of their work on the same level but with additional reduction of some resources: time (decreasing labor by delegation or automatization), money, health, emotional cost, side effects (e.i. environmental cost) etc.

Reasons of the problem

• High complexity

Possible solutions of the problem

• Sometimes Lean Methods will work if tracking of resources is easy to do

• Dynamic Methods

Getting out of the Trap/Quitting very strong addition

Traps are complex situations where physical, mental, environmental constraints prevent desired change.

Additions are simple traps where the change is difficult due to the existence of a strong opposite force.

Reasons of the problem

• There are very strong feedback loops (and/or very many of them) that punish every desired action and reward every undesired action.

Possible solutions of the problem

• Sometimes Environmental Methods can help (e.i. move a heroin addict to some island where there is no heroin), though it’s difficult and sometimes the change isn’t stable (consider moving heroin addict back from the island)

• (?) Dynamic Methods - this is just my pure assumption as dynamic methods are “unicorns” (they exist as a concept but nobody has implemented them commercially)

Summary

To sum up the whole post:

• All people are struggling with making the change they want. The difference is what type of problems they have

• Millions of people are struggling to go through beginners problems that are relatively easy to tackle using existing methods

• Other people are struggling with problems that are just complex and difficult

Here are my main conclusions:

• Increase motivation of people to start doing desired actions and control the initial difficulty of actions

• Create complex solutions that will be able to handle complex problems

The solution in both cases is the usage of Dynamic (Gamified) Self-Development Methods. I will continue to elaborate on it in future articles.