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A skeptical dive into the weird, sketchy, occasionally life-changing world
of self-improvement.
What You Can Learn From Elon Musk
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“Elon Musk is kind of a hero of mine” I wrote those words, with my own brain, controlling my own fingers. And when I wrote them, they were true. In my defence: In days of yore, around a decade ago, it was hard to avoid the idea that Elon Musk was a kind of techno-savior. […]
Map of the Problematic
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Map of the Problematic – The Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement Podcast 0:00 /1246.02068 1× A while back I set up a podcast to listen to while I mowed the lawns. It was ostensibly about weightlifting, by an…
Making The Link
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While I’m working on a bigger piece, I figured I’d write up some self-improvement links I thought were worth collecting. I haven’t done this before so I’m not sure if it’s a good idea. Do you like…
Going To Pot
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It’s not about marijuana, sorry. I’ll save that for another time. It’s about the garden. See, we have these potted plants on the deck. There’s herbs, some plants some friends gave us, a plant with a horrifically…
The Bitter-Pill Truth About Making Your Bed
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Steel yourselves. I don’t know how one steels themselves – perhaps it is by taking an enormous amount of iron, grabbing a few charcoal bricks, and climbing into a blast furnace – but do what you need…
He’s checking in
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Time for a low-pressure check-in newsletter. How are you doing? Good? Don’t worry, I’ll have found a way to make you feel bad by the end of this. Yeet Your Phone: The Yeetening In phone-yeeting news, I…
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,…
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,…
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…
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…
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…