Newsletter #3

My self-improvement journey began with a Krav Maga (Israeli martial art) boot camp in November 2019 in Israel. This was the first time I booked a two-week trip with strangers. The camp was amazing, I learned a lot, both in terms of fighting and socially. If you ever get the chance to do a martial arts boot camp, I highly recommend it. I’m still in contact with one of the participants. Sadly, at the moment, I can no longer practice Krav Maga due to knee issues. Eventually, with the right exercises, I hope to fix my knee.

Besides the boot camp, turning 30 also woke me up and made me question what I had done with my life so far. The thought of all the identical houses came back to me, as mentioned in the first newsletter. By chance, I saw a video by Order of Man on YouTube about seven books every man should read.
Spoiler: I still haven’t read all the books.

My conclusion was that I could improve, so I started watching self-help videos and buying various books on self-improvement. The idea that I could do everything myself was also very appealing, though that turned out to be only partly true.

The book that really kicked things off was Atomic Habits by James Clear. At the time, I was a bit lazy and often didn’t do the dishes after dinner. One thing that can really ruin my mornings is finding dirty dishes in the sink. Alongside journaling, I started by committing to doing the dishes before going to bed. This turned out to be very effective, and soon I was stacking more habits. Dishes were followed by cleaning and tidying up the kitchen and living room. Surprisingly, this took far less time than I had anticipated. I went to bed feeling good and woke up stress-free.

Journaling helped me hold myself accountable. Later, I learned that self-accountability only gets you so far, but that’s a story for another time. I began by writing down my new daily habits. Over time, this evolved into a simple version of bullet journaling. I tracked my daily habits, listed my daily tasks, and wrote down the highlights of my day in one to three lines. Eventually, I stopped doing monthly and weekly reviews, as they no longer felt useful.

Currently, I mainly journal about my progress in IFS, both in writing and audio recordings. As my bullet journal entries started to look very similar, I stopped daily journaling on April 16, 2025. Instead, I started taking a weekly photo of myself to track my workout progress.