Not trying to do things alone

Doing things with other people or through other people makes everything a hundred times easier. I don't think I'm exaggerating.

For example:

Personality changes: I quit cigarettes and weed cold turkey, started lifting weights, completely changed my diet, and became much more ambitious (which manifested in learning programming and tripling my salary within one year), all completely effortlessly, just by switching from a social group where the previous behavior was the norm to a social group where the new behavior was the norm.

Material resources: Almost all of my jobs, almost all of the apartments I've lived in, and a significant proportion of my romantic/sexual relationships I got through friends or acquaintances. Also, a couple times I've got through a rough patch thanks to loans/material help from friends.

Doing things together: So far I've been doing most things alone, because (1) I'm still only beginning to grasp how much this whole lesson is true and how much I'm not doing it (2) I still have to fight things like extreme introversion (getting tired by people), extreme conflict avoidance (I'm an "exit" rather than "voice" type of person), the fear of reaching out/being vulnerable, not paying attention and falling into old behavioral patterns, etc.

But going off limited and/or second-hand experience, things like…

starting a business
learning a completely new field
moving to a different country and trying to get a job there

…can be pants-shittingly terrifying if done alone, and relatively effortless and enjoyable if done with other people.

Feedback: I still have to figure out how to beat honest feedback out of people (they're surprisingly reluctant to criticize), but even the limited amount of feedback I was able to get lead me to discover gaping blindspots in my social skills (which I can now work on) and helped me understand my social interactions in the past (e.g. why so many people hated me in high school). But again, I had to be really persistent to get at least one person to be honest with me for once.

It starts to seem to me that not trying to solicit feedback/input constantly is highly suboptimal. Would you believe that most people almost never actively solicit feedback?

In general, I'm trying to steer slowly from yapping at people about my own ideas to listening to what they have to say about things. I think it's recently been useful in learning about e.g. productivity and entrepreneurship, or what the world looks like from a woman's perspective. Again, it feels like almost nobody does this.

Summary

Trying to achieve anything alone is just plain stupid. (This is the kind of heuristic that's not meant to be literally true, it's just meant to make you better off if you trust it. YMMV.)

And I mean, it all sounds obvious, but just watch yourself, see how often you do things alone vs. ask for advice/help/feedback/companionship/support/etc. (or for that matter, how often you offer these things to others).

Life Improvements