Well, let's step one step backwards.

The first question might be, why should you even bother improving yourself?

And I think the answer to that is something like, so you don't suffer any more stupidly than you have to.

And maybe so others don't have to either.

It's something like that.

You know, like there's a real injunction at the bottom of it.

It's not some casual self-help doctrine.

It's that if you don't organize yourself properly, you'll pay for it, and in a big way, and so will the people around you.

And you could say, well, I don't care about that, but that's actually not true.

You actually do care about that, because if you're in pain, you will care about it.

And so you do care about it, even if it's just that negative way.

It's very rare that you can find someone who's in excruciating pain who would ever say, well, it would be no better if I was out of this.

It's sort of pain is one of those things that brings the idea that it would be better if it didn't exist along with it.

It's incontrovertible.

You get your act together so that there isn't any more stupid pain around you than necessary.

Well, so then the question might be, well, how would you go about getting your act together?

And the answer to that, and this is a phenomenological idea, too.

It's something like, look around for something that bothers you, and see if you can fix it.

You can do this in a room.

It's quite fun to do it just when you're sitting in a room, like maybe your bedroom.

You can sit there and just sort of meditate on it and think, okay, if I wanted to make this room better, what would I have to do?

And you have to ask yourself that, right?

It's not a command.

It's like a genuine question.

And things will pop out in the room that you know, like there's a stack of papers over there that's kind of bugging you, and you know that maybe a little order there would be a good thing, and there's some rubbish behind your computer monitor that you haven't attended to for like six months, and the room would be slightly better if it was a little less dusty and the cables weren't all tangled up the same way, and there'll be all sorts of things that'll pop out in it that you could just fix.

And, you know, I might say, well, if you were coming to see me for psychotherapy, the easiest thing for us to do first would just be to get you to organize your room.

You think, well, is that psychotherapy?

And the answer is, well, it depends on how you conceive the limits of your being.

I would say, start where you can start, you know?

If something announces itself to you, which is a strange way of thinking about it, as in need of repair that you could repair, then hey, fix it.

You fix a hundred things like that, your life will be a lot different.

Now, I often tell people, too, fix the things you repeat every day, because people tend to think of those as trivial.

You get up, you brush your teeth, you have your breakfast, you know, you have your routines that you go through every day.

Well, those probably constitute 50% of your life.

And people think, well, they're mundane, I don't need to pay attention to them.

It's like, no, no, that's not what you do every day.

Those are the most important things you do.

So, a hundred adjustments to your broader domain of being, and there's a lot less rubbish around, and a lot fewer traps for you to step into.

Once you've got your mind and your emotions together, and once you're acting that out, then you can extend what you're willing to consider yourself, and start fixing up the things that are part of your broader extent.

Now, sometimes you don't know how to do that.

So, you might say, imagine you're walking down the street, you're an alcoholic and schizophrenic, and has been on the streets for 10 years, he sort of stumbled towards you, and, you know, incoherently mutters something.

That's a problem.

And, it would be good if you could fix it, but you haven't got a clue about how to fix that.

You just walk around that, and go find something that you could fix, because if you muck about in that, not only is it unlikely that you'll help that person, it's very likely that you'll get hurt yourself.

So, you know, just because while you're experiencing things, announce themselves as in need of repair, doesn't mean that it's you right then and there that should repair them.

You have to have some humility.

You know, you don't walk up to a helicopter that isn't working and just start tinkering away with it.

You have to stay within your domain of competence, but most of the time, if people look at their lives, it's a very interesting thing to do.

I like the idea of the room, because you can do that at the drop of a hat.

You know, you go back to where you live and sit down and think, okay, I'm going to make this place better for half an hour.

What should I do?

You have to ask.

And things will just pop up like mad, and it's partly because your mind is a very strange thing.

As soon as you give it a name, a genuine name, it'll reconfigure the world in keeping with that aim.

That's actually how you see to begin with.

And so if you set it a task, you have to be genuine about it, which is why you have to bring your thoughts and emotions together, and then you have to get them in your body so you're acting consistently.

You have to be genuine about the aim, but once you aim, the world will reconfigure itself around that aim, which is very strange.

And it's technically true.

You know, the best example of that, you have all seen this video, where you watch the basketballs being tossed back and forth between members of the white team versus the black team, and while you're doing that, a gorilla walks up into the middle of the video, and you don't see it.

It's like, you know, if you thought about that experiment for about five years, that would be about the right amount of time to spend thinking about it.

Because what it shows you is that you see what you aim at, and that man, if you can get one thing through your head as a consequence of even being in university, that would be a good one.

You see what you aim at.

One inference you might draw from that is, be careful what you aim at.

Right?

What you aim at determines the way the world manifests itself to you.

And so if the world is manifesting itself in a very negative way, one thing to ask is, are you aiming at the right thing?

Now, you know, I'm not trying to reduce everybody's problems to an improper aim.

People get cut off at the knees for all sorts of reasons.

You know, they get sick, they have accidents, there's a random element to being, that's for sure.

And so you don't want to take anything, even that particular phrase, too far.

You want to bind it with the fact that random things do happen to people.

But it's still a great thing to ask.