While I encourage becoming a better you every day and optimizing your life in such a way that you can have increasing respect for yourself, I genuinely hope you're not one of those people who suffer from principle oversaturation - meaning their life is so disciplined and their behaviour so principled that they no longer recognize it as an achievement - it comes so naturally that they don't feel like they deserve their own respect for it anymore.
What could possible be worse than that?
Because what this means is that even though the need to feel progress is a handy tool in personal development, it also means that at some point you reach a summit that will not feel like anything. And while you can argue that personal development has no summit, there's only so many areas in one's life that one can optimize.
There are a couple of answers to this problem. One is that you simply get used to the feeling of inadequacy - the feeling that even though your baseline is higher than that of others, it's not a high one with respect to yourself. It might take a while, and it is a depressing thought, but it's one way to cope with the situation.
Option number two was not presented to me until last night: give up on one principle. Forfeit it. Regress it to the lower level.
Say you're a high achiever, working 12 hour days, running every morning, following a disciplined diet, and suffer from princinple oversaturation. The solution? Give up the diet. Eat pizza and candy or whatever was not allowed before.
And suddenly, you have an area in your life you're not perfect in. This not only puts all the other areas into perspective, but also relieves stress and gives you something to strive for later in the future.
RK
