Life Is Iterative

Scan any brick and mortar or online bookstore’s self-help section and you’re likely to see an abundance of books telling you that if you just do what they say to do your life will be great.

Create a plan. Build strong habits. Cut the carbs. Invest your money certain ways. Exercise like this. Avoid that. The list of dos and don’ts espoused by these books are well meaning, sometimes correct, but almost always just one piece of the self-improvement guidance puzzle you need at the time. It’s never the whole story.

You don’t just do one thing now or over a short period of time and have it magically change your life entirely for the better. To coin a phrase made popular by a recent television commercial, “that’s not how this works; that’s not how any of this works.”

The assumption made when reading many self-help books is that they provide “the” secret to a better life. Do what they say or believe what they believe and somehow the rest of your life is laid out like a bed of roses. Hogwash.

Life is iterative, not something you fashion one way that then leads to an ideal life as a result.

First, while many software developers might immediately recognize the word iterative, it’s not a word tossed around much in regular daily conversation otherwise.

Something that is iterative involves repetition. Iteration if the repetition of something on an ongoing basis in order to arrive at some ever-changing better result.

A popular trend in software development is iterative development, the dividing of large software development projects into smaller chunks where code is designed, developed and tested in repeated cycles rather than in a single longer process. The entire project becomes one big feedback loop that keeps informing the next step in the process to keep improving the software over time.

When applied to personal self-improvement, iterative development is what life is truly like. It’s not the simple narrative you often get from many self-help writers, speakers, and gurus. You don’t do one thing and have that one thing suddenly improve your life forever.

Life is about adjusting to the context of where you’re at in the moment. Life is about doing something, assessing its effect, seeing what can be improved, then doing the new something, assessing its effect, seeing what else can be improved… and so on. Forever. It never stops.

In other words, life is iterative. It’s not fixed and static. The solutions to our self-improvement problems aren’t fixed or static. The environment in which we find ourselves trying to improve isn’t fixed or static. Nothing is fixed or static. Why should self-improvement solutions be any different?

I think this is one of the viewpoints that changes everything when we’re consuming self-help content. If you approach life as one big, constant feedback loop (iterative), life itself and self-improvement specifically become much less stressful and more manageable. You don’t have to fix your life in every way possible right now. No one does. Really. No one. Even when they think they might have. Life just doesn’t work that way.

Seeing life as iterative offers us ongoing opportunities for reinvention, big and small.

Going from out of shape couch potato to muscled and fit no longer is a two-year process. Instead, it’s maybe cutting out one bad thing from your diet this month and hitting that yoga class a couple of times each week. Maybe after that month you reassess, adjust your diet more, and add in some weightlifting. Maybe a few years down the line all that becomes boring and you decide hiking and cycling are your new exercise choices. Iterative.

Learning a skill like video editing or software programming isn’t about a long, protracted education cycle. It becomes learning about this little bit of foundation knowledge, trying it out, seeing how you can improve, fine tuning and building on your knowledge a bit more, trying it out again, and seeing how you can improve the latest result. Iterative.

Meditating every day no longer becomes learning one way to meditate and now doing that perfectly forever for the rest of your life. Rather, you learn a bit about meditation, try meditating for five minutes a day, see how that feels and what might improve that experience, learn a bit more, and try meditating again. Iterative.

You get the idea. This applies to all of life.

Stop thinking of any self-improvement undertaking as necessarily being a drawn out process. Instead, think of all of life as a series of short bursts of learning, application, and assessment — iterative. You’ll no longer be held prisoner by needing to get it perfect the first time. No one ever does. And what’s perfect for us can change over time. As we change as people, and the environment in which we live changes, what we decide is best for us can change accordingly.

Go forth and iterate. It makes the ride that is life much more enjoyable and meaningful self-improvement doable.

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