Cambridge is a place full of busy, ambitious people, looking for ways to improve their lives, hone their hot takes, and find less shitty friends. But combine the infamous Cambridge workload with the struggles of maintaining basic hygiene and crafting existential memes, there is precious little time to plan one’s own personal development. That’s what I’m here to solve, with a weekly column testing out guides to improvement of all kinds.

I begin this task from a skeptical angle. Personally, I am of the position that improvement is an illusion and people should just learn to love their stupid, shitty lives. As I sit here writing, last night’s mascara still smudged beneath my eyelids, spooning rice pudding out of the tin with a melon baller, I can’t help but think. This. Is. Heaven. But I will persevere with this public service nonetheless, if for no reason other than that having a slightly quirky lifestyle column might help me get a job at Vice.

Week One: Tai Lopez

Tai Lopez is a YouTube life coach, infamous for his much-parodied ‘here in my garage’ advert promoting his ‘67 Steps’ programme. If you never watched past the five second mark, the most important thing to know about Tai is that he loves something he calls knaaaawledge, gained through a huge book collection which for unexplained reasons he keeps in his garage (so he can read in his Lamborghini??). He claims to read a book a day and that he reads a book in ten minutes.

Unfortunately, Tai’s taste for brevity does not carry through to his videos, which are twenty-odd (often very odd) minutes of mostly the same two minutes worth of information, and can only reasonably be watched at 2x speed. I have now watched quite a lot of Tai Lopez videos. Speed-watching videos like ‘The Real Reason You’re Broke’, ‘What You Can Do to Come Out on Top in Any Social Situation’, and ‘Which of Your Friends Should You Avoid’, I manage to reduce his philosophy to its speed-readable cliff notes (Tai would be proud) and set out to test them.

As it turns out, Tai’s method for speed reading is skipping half of the book. I shit you not, Tai Lopez believes that “the problem with books is that they fill em up with a tonne of words.” His system involves a 2 minute ‘detective skim’ of the covers and chapter names, a 5 minute skim of the book looking for things to come back to, and a 15-30 minute deep skim where you actually read some of the words (don’t bother asking how this adds up to ten minutes).

This may be ground-breaking advice if there are any Mathmos amongst my readership, but as a HSPS student who is fairly confident that nobody on my course has ever actually read a book, Tai’s techniques are pretty basic.

Next up finding a mentor and abandoning friends. For the first task, I message my good friend Louis, Varsity’s ‘Editor-at-large’, which is a title so meaningless I presume it must have taken someone really smart to convince the Editors to let them have it; perfect mentor material. I test him out with some top Tai material.

His response is cruel but contains a nugget of harsh truth. And as Tai says, sometimes people who are mean to us can be useful in improving ourselves by keeping us grounded. But there’s a catch, a flaw in Tai’s philosophy.

Tai tells us to get rid of friends who are a holding us back, and the worst combination of character traits is high self-esteem and high insecurity. What is one to do with someone insecure enough but with high enough self esteem to call himself Editor-at-Large, but also smart enough to get other people to agree to call him it. Like the proverbial corporate tax attorney, I have found a loophole.

Finally I head out to the Freshers’ Fair with my clever person glasses on, books under arm, imagining everyone I pass is Barbadian R&B superstar Rihanna. This is Tai’s final piece of advice, and comes from a video where he talks about his experience meeting Rihanna and how humble she was and how we should all strive to be as humble as Rihanna (he talks about this a lot).

This is a task that requires some stretch of the imagination if taken completely literally, as most of the stallholders are distinctly unglamorous white men. I persevere nonetheless and end up striking a conversation with the custodians of the ‘Ethics in Mathematics’ stand. In ordinary circumstances I would have dismissed the stand as a poor opportunity to fulfil the usual motivation for converstation; demonstrating how smart I am (I know little about Maths and am incredibly unethical). But, after taking a deep breath and carefully synthesising a mental image of Barbadian R&B superstar Rihanna over the gentleman’s face, I discover that actually, other people do have interesting things to say, and that there was a lot I could learn about ethics and mathematics. I picked up a term card and bade him farewell.

While the books were not much help, besides a useful place to store term cards, I was quite sincerely surprised to see how much more I could get out of conversation when not using it purely as a means to show off. With some respect to Tai, a lot of the stuff he says is actually not terrible advice. The tip to listen to others, rather than simply waiting for your time to speak (or what I have labelled the ‘imagine everyone is Rihanna rule’) is pretty reasonable, if somewhat obvious for anyone not deeply narcissistic.

Sadly, as a life coach he has two fatal flaws. The first is that his few tidbits of insight do not merit the torturously long videos, many of which simply reiterate points he has made a hundred times already. The second is that he has an incredibly obnoxious personality. From the annoying voice to the name dropping to his insistence on using attractive women as wallpaper in his videos, it grates to take advice on how to my live my life from someone so evidently shallow. I bet he’s never even had a rice pudding.

Overall, if you put Tai on 2x speed there’s not much that objectionable, but there’s little to learn from Tai that you can’t gather from a little self-awareness. After all it’s fewer than 67 steps to Sainsbury’s from my room and you can get all the self-improvement you need there for £5 a bottle.

I leave with you with a couple of gems from Tai’s YouTube channel:

“All that white privilege stuff, I can do the same thing with anybody who has a moderately normal IQ. If they’re brain damaged or something it would be hard”

“The odds of you meeting somebody who knows as much about personality types as me is infinitesimal”

“I don’t read magazines” (BUT WHY?? THEY HAVE SO FEW WORDS)