Thinking tool: Recursively self-improve

Adam Jones

Personally

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7 September 20267 September 2026

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime.

Teach a man to teach himself, and umm... he'll improve all wellbeing outcomes for the beings in his moral circle?

Investing in improving yourself is usually a smart move. What's even more powerful is when this compounds - i.e. when improving yourself also makes you better at improving your future self.

It's therefore worth thinking about how you can improve yourself in this way. I think practising improving your general thinking skills helps here. Additionally, favouring improvements to the improvement process itself through meta-retros and post-mortems, or feedback loops on your feedback loops.

Related concepts

This is part of my thinking tools series - an effort to sharpen and improve my own thinking and share it with others!

Also consider:

• Overcorrect, then settle: can often be a useful move to figure out where you should land when you've decided to change something
• Build feedback loops: the improvement loop only compounds if the feedback actually flows
• Shorten cycle times, reduce batch sizes: shorter cycles tend to lead to faster rates of improvement