The Marble and Its Sculptor
March 24, 2025
I've been thinking a bit about self-improvement and self-mastery, and how modern culture views both. I'm reminded of Michelangelo's quote on how he went about sculpting:
I saw the angel in the marble, and carved until I set him free.
Self improvement is similar. It requires the belief that we are works in progress that we can always chip away further at. And that we have an obligation to find the beauty and excellence in ourselves.
And so you are both the block of marble, and its sculptor. What a privilege it is to be both! We are afforded the opportunity to improve ourselves, and master the craft of self-mastery.
Unlike a painting that cannot choose its painter or a sculpture that cannot direct its sculptor, we possess both the raw material and the creative vision to shape ourselves. The sculptor sees potential in raw stone where others see only a block. Similarly, those who embrace self-mastery see potential within themselves that others might miss.
Chipping away
Every day, we either let the block sit without refinement, or we act to craft a masterpiece.
This daily choice defines our journey. The sculptor doesn't transform marble into David in a single session. Rather, it's the accumulation of thousands of deliberate chisel strikes, each removing what doesn't belong. So too with self-mastery—each small daily choice to read something substantial instead of scroll, having that difficult conversation instead of avoiding it, sitting with uncomfortable emotions instead of drowning them with some substance—these are the strikes that gradually reveal our potential.
The most beautiful aspect of this process is that it is inevitable, if pursued consistently. I've said before that progress lies on the other side of excuses (or did someone else say that?), and that we are nothing more than the product of our habits.
Excellence isn't something we must construct from nothing; it's something already within us, waiting to be uncovered through patient, deliberate removal of what doesn't serve our highest self. (And in an age of abundance, self-improvement is chiefly defined by the removal of excess and vices—stop scrolling, stop vaping, stop binging, etc.—rather than the addition of virtue. Virtue can come later.)
Self mastery is not sexy
Rarely do we encounter those who believe in self-mastery and in crafting themselves as a final masterpiece. More commonly, we encounter those who are content with survival. Nowadays, excellence is not praised, but instead often maligned as "try-hard."
Art is praised in traditional mediums, but when it comes to self-improvement, it is denigrated. What's different? The most obvious difference is that others notice their own discrepancies from excellence. In other words, art is easy to praise because few of us are artists; self-improvement is easy to laugh at because few of us try to improve ourselves.
This paradox reveals much about our cultural values. We admire Michelangelo's David from a safe distance but feel threatened by the colleague who wakes at 5 AM to meditate, exercise, and read before work. Why? Because traditional art demands nothing of its viewers, while the embodied art of a self-mastered individual implicitly challenges others to examine their own choices.
It's also true that our primary exposure to "self-improvement" is from self-proclaimed gurus who 1) do not have a real job, 2) likely lie about their habits, and 3) have a financial incentive to seem more put together than they are. You might recall this morning routine that went viral. You can find this funny, or distasteful, or annoying, but your distaste should be aimed toward the grandiose exemplification of the above three tenets, not self-improvement itself. (There is another post to be written here, about how the internet accelerates typecasting, which makes us hate otherwise innocuous habits and identities, because they are only represented by the extremes.)
Find the angel in the marble
You are both the block of marble, and its sculptor. That's not to say that you should be perfect, but that you should be persistent in your pursuit of excellence. The greatest artists throughout history understood that their creations were never perfect, only pursued or abandoned.