Awareness is precisely what’s important for self-improvement, no doubt about that. But unawareness is what’s important about self-maintenance.

The goal of all these self improvement programs should be to keep people aware of their actions until they become good habits. It’s very Aristotelian. We are what we do, if we focus on doing good, we become habituated towards doing good, and become good. And once we’re good, we don’t have to be aware of our good actions, we’re on goodness autopilot.

I think the failure of most self improvement programs is that they require so much work and conscious effort that people tire of them; they never really become habits. The difference between a dieter and someone at their ideal weight is that the dieter needs to work to eat healthy, but the other person does it naturally.