10 Levels of the Self-Improvement Hierarchy, Explained

Ever wanted to start a journey of self-improvement but had no idea where to start? Or maybe you’ve been climbing the self-improvement hierarchy for a while but have hit a plateau and need to know the next level. This post contains a blueprint for personal development—a roadmap that will take you from whatever level you are on right now and show you how to reach the top.

Some of these levels can be done simultaneously, but don’t try to skip ahead. You’ll see why.

10 Levels of the Self-Improvement Hierarchy

• Level 1: Mental Health
• Level 2: Make Money
• Level 3: Figure out Your Goals
• Level 4: Who Are You?
• Level 5: Decide on Your Hobbies, Skills & Intellectual Pursuits
• Level 6: Become More Productive
• Level 7: Optimize your Work and Hobbies
• Level 8: Optimize Mental Health
• Level 9: Decide Your Beliefs
• Level 10: Optimize Energy
• The Top of the Hierarchy

Level 1: Mental Health

You don’t need to solve every psychological issue right now. You don’t even need to work on your mindset, but you must solve the following three issues. If you don’t you’ll never get past the first level.

• Serious Addictions
• Debilitating Anxiety
• Depression

I see plenty of people online asking how they should start improving themselves. Often, the questions (usually on Reddit) start something like this. “I just graduated college and haven’t found a job yet. I’m living with my parents and don’t need to pay rent or living expenses, but I feel like a loser. I think I’m depressed. I spend most days just wasting my time online. I don’t do anything worthwhile even though I want to, and whenever I try, it feels like it’s impossible. I just don’t know where to start.”

The replies always look like this:

• Set some goals and start working towards them
• Break up your goals into smaller tasks
• Try writing a journal every morning and detail what you want your life to be like
• Take cold showers!

These are all excellent suggestions, but not for someone who can barely get out of bed. When you are depressed, have a severe addiction, or wake up feeling exhausted every day and have no ability to focus, you can’t “work on your goals,” you don’t have the energy to write a journal, you don’t have the motivation to do anything, and cold showers will just make you even more miserable. No, you must work on your mental health first. Forget about reading the classics, learning a new language, or going to the gym. Take the time to resolve your mental problems first.

How?

First, commit to doing nothing else. Take the pressure off yourself. The only thing you need to do right now is to get yourself feeling better. Once you’ve stabilized, everything will be more manageable.

Second, name your problem. Are you grossly overweight? An alcoholic? Can you not get through the day without smoking weed? Are you depressed? Do you have social anxiety? You can’t work on it till you’ve named it. If you smoke cigarettes or enjoy a few drinks at the end of the day, it’s probably not something you need to work on right now. Go after the issues that are affecting your life.

Third, ask for help. Professional help or the help of family and friends might be the only way to regain your mental health.

So if you’re addicted to smoking weed and it stops you from going out or doing anything productive, ask friends and family to help you quit, even if it means watching you 24/7 (your Mom will do this for you) until the cravings cease. If you have anxiety or depression, you should see a mental health professional.

Fourth, commit to some exercise. A 10-minute walk is a great start. Set it in stone as part of your schedule by connecting it to something else you already do. For example, “After dinner every day, I go for a walk.” Running or the gym can come later; just make sure you’re doing something. Studies show exercise is the best natural remedy for psychological problems.

Fifth, improve your diet by removing the worst thing or adding one nutritious food. Again, this isn’t about perfecting your diet or changing your relationship with food – that can come later – it’s about a minor improvement to boost your mental health. Swap fries for a salad once a week, stop drinking soda, or swap McDonald’s for Chipotle. Figure out how to make your diet slightly better, and you’ll feel the difference.

Sixth, ensure you get enough sleep. If you’re not getting 7 hours a night, adjust your bedtime.

Lastly, give it a little time. You’ll start to notice a change after step four. It might take you six weeks to get all the way to step 6, or you might be able to speed through them all in a week. Either way, give yourself time to get through the steps and to start seeing results—they will come!

Skip this level, and it will constantly drag you back down. It will limit your earnings, your relationships, your health, and all the things you want to do in life. It’s worth the time it takes to resolve.

Level 2: Make Money

This will enable you to do everything else.

If you’re making minimum wage or nothing at all, making more money should be your number one priority!

Before you start worrying about building a second brain or optimizing your literature notes, get some money coming in! Books cost money, and so does improving your diet or almost anything you want to do to improve yourself. I know you might be thinking I want to learn a language, and I can do so with free resources online,” But you’ll learn faster and easier if you buy the books and pay for a teacher or native speaker to practice with.

Money is the easiest way to improve every aspect of your life, so make it your first focus.

• Reduce your stress levels
• Learn faster
• Buy a better diet
• Pay for your gym equipment
• A faster computer
• An assistant
• Gear for your hobby

If you use it right, money is the key to unlocking the other levels of the self-improvement hierarchy.

• Build a Business – Can you build a business with an hour a day? Have you tried?
• Get a Side Gig – Turn your free time into cash by getting a part-time job, consulting on the side, or teaching a class.
• Get Paid More – Use your evenings to study for a qualification which will enable you to ask for a higher salary.

There’s no instant fix to make you a ton of money tomorrow. But rather than spending four hours today at the driving range or summarizing Dostoevsky, spend the time on something that will eventually make you more money in the end. Fyodor can wait on your bookshelf; he won’t mind.

Level 3: Figure out Your Goals

• Who do you want to be?
• What do you want to have?
• What do you want to do?

Write them down, set them in stone, and look at them often.

Every self-help guru tells you to make goals, not because they help you achieve them, it’s so you know when you’re wasting your time. If your goal is to move to Italy, why are you spending $200 a month on building your record collection? Sure, people can have multiple goals and work on them simultaneously, but the goals only serve to highlight the time you spend on something that doesn’t help you achieve one of your goals.

Your goals are a judgment on you. “Going out to eat isn’t taking you closer to your goals,” “Watching TV every evening isn’t making any progress on your goals.” They speak out to you and judge you when you don’t work on them. Let them. Feel the guilt or the shame, and let them change your behavior. Let them shape what you do. You don’t want to look back and think “I wasted my twenties.”

Your goals are what you really care about and who you really want to be when you’re quiet, still, and thoughtful. They are the real you, the best of you. As you align your day-to-day life with the ideals you have laid out, you become who you actually are. When Neo stepped into the Matrix, he was no longer a loser geek; he became the potential he knew he could be. Let your goals do that to you.

Level 4: Who Are You?

If you’ve never taken a personality test (I mean a real one, not something your Aunt shared on Facebook), now is the time to do one. I recommend you take the free Big Five test, which has become the standard for psychologists. Why? It tells you more than just your “personality type.” It will show you your scores for each of the five main personality aspects and their subdivisions. From this, you can then see your motivations.

Knowing your motivations is like a cheat code to your brain. It’s a huge mental hack that no one talks about, and few people understand it without taking a personality test.

• If you’ve ever wondered why you do something you wish you didn’t, it will tell you.
• If you want to make yourself work harder, it will tell you how

The other useful aspect of taking a personality test is knowing your shortcomings. These are the things you can work on.

Level 5: Decide on Your Hobbies, Skills & Intellectual Pursuits

Soon after setting goals, you realize you can’t do them all.

It’s a sad truth of life that there isn’t enough time to do everything, so you must choose. The earlier and more decisive, the better.

You can’t be a world champion kickboxer and a master woodworker. Instead, you must focus in and filter out. You can be world-class at your chosen hobby, but it will take up all your time. To be an Olympic-level wrestler, training is your full-time job, and you should (rightfully) expect to spend all your time on it.

On the other hand, becoming an expert requires less time. I call this level a black belt, whereas world-class is a 9th-degree black belt.

You can become an expert with regular, consistent practice in just a few years. For most people, this should be the level you aim for with your most loved hobbies. It gives you enough time to have a life and pursue other things.

But still, you can’t pursue many things at this level.

Level 6: Become More Productive

Self-improvement hierarchy level six! This is where most people start, and this is where most people think self-improvement resides. But only after you have done all the work in the previous levels will this level make any significant difference to you. I recommend you learn GTD, though time blocking, habit stacking, and a simple to-do list will also help.

This is the start of optimizing.

Millions of dollars go into designing and manufacturing F1 car spoilers (the little wing on the back of the car). A good spoiler can add downward force to keep the car on the road without adding too much weight or affecting the car’s ability to go around corners. The difference between a good spoiler and a great spoiler might be a second of race time in Formula One.

A second is a big difference in a sport where fractions of seconds make champions and losers.

But a spoiler is not what you need if you’re 18 and have just bought your first car – a second-hand Ford Ka from 2004. And yet, we’ve all seen boy racers with 22-inch rims, a fat, loud exhaust, and a spoiler on their little cars with blacked-out windows and blaring music pumping out of them.

They’ve made the fatal mistake of optimizing before they had anything to optimize.

With self-improvement, you must have something to optimize before you start with the steps in level six.

But if you’ve got your mental health on lock, you’ve got money coming in, and you know who you are, what you want to do, and how to spend your free time, it’s time to work on productivity.

Productivity is the art of doing more, and there are thousands of methods, systems, and hacks to help you become more productive. I’ve written dozens of articles about every aspect of productivity. It’s fascinated me since I wanted to work out how to level up more efficiently in World of Warcraft back in 2006.

But here, let’s focus on the three greatest productivity methods you must master if you want to get more done.

1. You need a list

It’s obvious, boring, and nothing new, but it’s the most effective way to get more done without hiring someone. The main reason you don’t get more done is that you don’t know what to do.

You’re in the office and finish the report for your boss. You send it to him, then wander around talking to people for 40 minutes, not because you need a break, but because you forgot you needed to call your kid’s teacher, buy a new phone case, and book your car in for new tires. Why? Because you were in “work mode,” and those were “life tasks”? No. Because they weren’t important enough for you to remember? No. Because you didn’t have them written down on a list you would see when you finished the report.

(In case you are wondering, this is also why the task management app on your phone never worked for you. You never had it open when you finished a task so you could immediately start the next one on the list – use a piece of paper this time, trust me)

2. Timing

You won’t hear any productivity gurus talk about timing, but it’s vital to understand your timing if you want to get more done.

Let’s say you took my advice above and started writing a daily to-do list. Today, it looks something like this:

• Go to the gym
• Write the next chapter of the novel
• Take the Fuzzball table to Jim’s
• Go grocery shopping
• Research laptops

Imagine this is your list for a Saturday. You wake up and, after some coffee, head to the gym for a hard workout. You go for a new PR and almost get it. On the way back, you get the groceries because you’re starving after your workout. You get home, and after helping your kid with their homework, you make lunch.

After the big meal, the idea of concentrating on anything makes you want to go back to bed, so you take the fuzzball table to Jim’s. He’s going to help you fix it. You shoot the shit with Jim while he tinkers around with the mechanics beneath the table. Jim’s a good guy, but he never stops talking, and you spend three hours there, even though it only took him 30 minutes to fix the table. The last thing you want to do now is write that chapter, so you pull out your phone and YouTube the best laptops of 2024. Your wife puts a meal in front of you, turns Netflix on, and the night disappears.

This wasn’t a disaster of a day. You got four out of five of your tasks done, but we both know that your novel is the most important thing to you.

What was the problem? Timing.

If you had done your writing first, you could have easily polished everything else off your list, too.

3. Delegate

If you are what you do, you could be more simply by delegating your work to someone else. Billionaires know this; it’s why Elon Musk can run X, Space X, and Tesla—he doesn’t actually do any of the coding, building, or manufacturing; he hires people to do it for him.

You might be thinking, “I don’t have the money to hire employees.” Go back to level 2. Yes, you need money to do this, but this will make the most significant difference to your productivity. If you hire one person, you could double your productivity—if you hire 100 people, you could do what would take 100 lifetimes.

Level 7: Optimize your Work and Hobbies

At this point, you probably don’t need me to tell you what to do anymore. You know what you want to do, and you’re doing it well. You can start looking at your work and hobbies, dialing them in one by one, tightening up everything you do, and striving for perfection.

• Hire a trainer – want to reach your potential in the gym or perfect that golf swing?
• Take an advanced course – Research professional training companies and reach the next level in your career.
• Buy Books, online courses, and one-to-one sessions with professionals to reach the next level of your hobbies.
• Hire a life coach or GTD professional to help you increase efficiency in everything you do.

Level 8: Optimize Mental Health

You stabilized your mental health at the bottom of this hierarchy; now it’s time to optimize it. On this level, you want to understand why you react the way you do, how your emotions and neuroticisms are holding you back, and start working on them.

Do you get annoyed easily or angry when someone challenges your ideas? Do you rely on alcohol to get you through tough times?

Much of this work needs to be done with a psychologist or therapist, although you can start by taking a quality personality test and start understanding who you are on a deeper level.

• Psychological Analysis
• Work on your bad habits, such as minor addictions
• Regulate your Drugs, Alcohol, and Diet
• Reduce Harmful Influences, e.g., Social Media & Online & News

Level 9: Decide Your Beliefs

Only after you know who you are can you honestly decide what you believe. Many of our beliefs are inherited from our parents, our culture, and our personalities. Research has found that creative people are more likely to be politically left-leaning, for example. So, if you want to find out what you really think, you need to take your biases into account.

• Politics
• Economics
• Religion
• Philosophy
• Ethics

These are huge topics, and a lifetime of study isn’t enough to get to the bottom of one of them. However, at this stage of the self-improvement hierarchy, it’s an immature mind that doesn’t have some idea of these topics and what they believe about them. If you’re in your 30s or 40s and haven’t started wrestling with these ideas, maybe it’s time to open a book.

Level 10: Optimize Energy

Optimizing your energy is a great way to squeeze out a little more from each day. If you can wake up a little earlier, have better, more rested sleep, or feel a little sharper during those first few hours of the day, you’ll consistently get more done, which will see you strides ahead of everyone else over the long term.

Remember, however, that this is the icing on the top. Start with the levels below this one, as they will give you the most significant results, and then come back and tweak some of the suggestions here.

• Cardio
• Fasting
• Diet
• Strength
• Sleep
• Cold Showers

The Top of the Hierarchy

If you’ve reached the top of the self-improvement hierarchy, you don’t need my suggestions. You already know what you’re doing and how to hit your peak. Just remember to reach down and pull someone else up with you.