A skeptical dive into the weird, sketchy, occasionally life-changing world
of self-improvement.
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Hey Arnold: a review of Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger
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There can’t be many people in the world more genuinely impressive than Arnold Schwarzenegger. His life trajectory is the stuff of (living) legend: born into obscurity and relative poverty in Austria, he became the world’s greatest bodybuilder,…
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Two steps forward, one step back
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As many people do, I had high hopes for the start of the year. I was on top of the yard work, I’d just finished listening to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s audiobook, I had a painting just about finished,…
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The Stories Men Tell Themselves
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A while ago I asked my friend Robbie if he’d be interested in writing a guest piece for the Cynic’s Guide, for a few reasons. One is that he’s a fantastic writer, and another is that he’s…
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Now live on Ghost
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This is The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement, a new version of a former Substack newsletter by Joshua Drummond. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you’d like to…
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Are New Year’s resolutions doomed to fail?
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You’ll have no doubt heard that only a small percentage of people who make a New Year’s resolution manage to keep it. It’s a piece of pop dicta, repeated endlessly in the period just before December 31…
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Substackers against Nazis
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There’s a good chance you’ve seen the following letter a lot lately: I’ve been meaning to send it out for a while now. I’m sending it to recipients of both The Bad Newsletter and here on the…
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Shut Up To Succeed
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There’s this skit at the opening of the Tenacious D song “Kielbasa” that starts with KG saying “Dude, we gotta fucken write something,” and because I got into the D at an impressionable age and the lyrics…
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Yeet your phone
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A few weeks back, I noticed my iPhone screen-time averages were starting get a bit silly. Like a lot of smartphone users, my device is set up to passively scold me for how long I use it,…
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Heavy lifting
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Every other day, I leave the box I live in, get into a box with wheels, and travel to another box, where the heavy things are. Once there, I pick up the heavy things and put them…
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The #1 thing most adults wish they could get better at
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Gidday Cynics, This newsletter has been a long time coming. This is strange, because it’s one of the very few areas in self-improvement where I already understand the topic, I’m reasonably proficient at it, and I even…