The point of self-improvement is not to reach some ideal self, but not to stay in the same place or get worse. So suppose I hadn't started to write music, hadn't taken piano lessons or sung in the choir. I would be the same person, but without whatever growth I achieved from going into music more seriously. I didn't need to learn to read Italian: I would have been fine without doing so. I could give up crossword puzzles and still have a satisfying life, without trying to do them faster and faster every day.
The idea that I need to find new research projects. I could easily just coast the rest of my career, and teach things I have already learned rather than come into the classroom with things I have learned in the past few years, as I like to do.
Without self-improvement, though, the world narrows rather than expanding. I would find it difficult to imagine being in a teaching situation in which I couldn't be a learner myself. It would go stale pretty quickly, and I think the students would notice too.
Although I don't think of it as self-improvement, I think of it as having new experiences, discovering new things, solving mysteries, getting better at some specific skill.
ReplyDeleteI also react poorly to the idea of the self as something that needs improvement -- but that's me.