Tuppence Ha'penny worth of a project.

My next big project? Me. Improving myself. "What have we here"? I ask myself, I am ready to delve in, find out the answer to the question and begin my work.

Why are we here, another simple question to transform one's life.

There is so much that I want to do, will I allow circumstances beyond my control to hold me back.

NO...definitely not! I do not have the answer this minute, but I promise that I will, and when I do, you will be the first to know.

This does not count as a project, you say. Of course working on my unfinished symphonies of life can be a project. Who decides what does or does not count as a work of art or creation.

Vocal does, everyone chime in...wondering if I have gone stark raving mad, offering words as my project.

Well, I don't care. I am still getting my tuppence ha'penny in.

Anyone ever notice that the problem with trying to improve our lives is that, all too often, the improvements we are attempting have little to do with our lives. We may seek to emulate the best artist or writer. To plan the next big project, but are we really poised for such a daring adventure. We must realize that the artist or writer has spent more time than you probably have done on planning and execution and we need some time to actualize our own projects before we are really ready to present ours for approval.

The average self-help book is unlikely to work much better: no matter how wise or sincere its author, it’s vanishingly unlikely they’ve ever met you. Even when a plan for change seems to arise independently, from inside your own mind, it usually takes the form of a fantasy about the person you think you ought to be, or would like to be, into which you then try to squeeze the person you actually are – for a few days, anyway, until the struggle becomes so frustrating that you give up in despair.

This is where the questions come into their own. Even if asked by people with expertise in the fields of relationships, career, health, home organization and more...they can be answered only by the person who possesses by far the most detailed understanding of what might genuinely make a difference in your life...that person is you!.

The notion that personal questions might be more powerful tools for self-transformation than off-the-shelf advice implies a specific view of human psychology: that most of the time, somewhere deep down, we already know what we want or need.

Could that be why books and articles that merely rattle through the ingredients of a happy life – close relationships, time spent in nature, plenty of physical movement, etc. – so frequently seem to fall flat. Nobody really needs telling that these things matter. The issue is how to address the unique set of hang-ups, character traits and personal circumstances that always seem to stop you putting them into practice.

The trouble is that the answers usually lie outside of consciousness: the conscious part of the mind (as the Jungian therapist and writer James Hollis puts it) “is at best a thin wafer floating on an iridescent sea”. But the right question can dredge that wisdom up to the surface. Your answers to the questions that follow might surprise you; perhaps you’ll conclude that you don’t need to reduce the clutter at home, or that your marriage is healthier than you’d realized. The fact that it’s even possible to surprise yourself like this proves the point: there’s some wisdom you know, but that you don’t necessarily know that you know. Yet!!!

Sometimes, a good question works by conjuring a parallel universe, permitting you temporarily to change the rules by which you engage with reality. This is the value of classic self-help prompts such as, “What would you do if money were no object?” or, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” The point isn’t that money won’t ever not be an object, or that you’ll succeed in abolishing all fear.

It’s that by setting these buzzing anxieties aside for a moment, you get to hear other parts of yourself. If you discover that in the absence of financial worries you’d write songs all day, that’s critical data – not because you should give up the day job (that could be the case, though it probably isn’t) but because if you can find even 20 minutes a day for songwriting, or story-writing you’ll be amazed at how much more enriching life becomes.

A related sort of question helps us bypass the misleading or superficial factors on which we tend to focus when deciding how to spend our time. Confronted by a significant life choice, you may rely on a question Hollis recommends: is the path I’m on, or the path I’m proposing to take, one that enlarges or diminishes me? It’s frequently impossible to say which of two options is the “best” or “right” one, or even which is more likely to lead to happiness.

But it’s often surprisingly easy to know, on an intuitive level, which is the path of “enlargement” or psychological growth. For different people, or at different stages of life, the very same external action – moving to another city, say, or beginning to look for a new job – could be an act of courage (which is enlarging) or an act of avoidance (which is diminishing). Hollis’s question can help you determine which is true for you.

Ultimately, the purpose of any good question like this is to redirect your attention away from escapist fantasies and back to the reality before you – which is the only place, after all, where real change could ever actually occur.

The Zen Buddhist and chef Edward Espé Brown’s favorite question for prompting deeper engagement with the world: “What have we here?” This embodies the attitude of the person opening the kitchen cupboard at 6pm on a weekday, to see what they might rustle up for dinner. But it’s an attitude worth taking to pretty much all of life.

Suppose you’d like to exercise more in 2025. All right: what have we here? A daily school run; a packed work schedule; perhaps a longstanding and seemingly intractable difficulty in getting up early. So maybe four 90-minute trips to the gym isn’t the place to begin.

What about a brisk walk, daily-ish? It’s tempting to dismiss this as taking the easy option, but it isn’t. Frittering your time away on daydreams of the perfect workout routine is the easy option. Facing the reality you’re in, and asking what you could start doing today, is the bold and empowering one.

Similar but true, is that when it comes to the longing many of us feel to do more about the multiple crises engulfing the world. Doom-scrolling through global climate data or news of international conflicts might feel like doing something, superficially, but we all know it doesn’t count.

Instead, look at your reality, which extends far beyond your phone. What have we here? A local group that could use your volunteering, possibly; a sum of money you could afford to donate; a flair for graphic design, or organizing events, or anything else that might be the beginning of something real.

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The right question meets you where you are – which is not just your external surroundings but your internal moods and emotions, too.

Conventional approaches to self-change often involve attempting to suppress what you’re feeling, so as to stick at all costs to a plan. But how’s that working out for you so far?

In her essay Learning to Work, the linguist and feminist scholar Virginia Valian describes being unable to make progress on her PhD thesis, thanks to paralyzing anxiety, until she began asking herself how much time she’d truly be willing to give to it each day. Three hours? “The very thought gave me an anxiety attack.” Two hours? One? Still impossible. Moving ever downwards, she eventually reached her point of willingness: 15 minutes. “A nice solid amount of time, an amount of time I knew I could live through every day.”

People laughed at how little it was, but all that mattered was that it worked, and that later she could gradually increase it: she was up and running again. Frankly, even a single minute a day of actual work, never mind 15, would have counted for more than all the hypothetical hours she might have told herself she ought to be working.

The questions need never stop. In a famous 1903 letter, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke urges a protege of his to:

“be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue … The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

His words capture the sense that asking questions is a way of living, complete in itself – not merely a preliminary step before you finally get life figured out.

History records no instance of anyone ever getting life finally figured out, so it’s probably best not to stake your happiness on achieving that yourself. All you need is the next question, then the next, and the next …

MY NEXT QUESTION IS WHAT PROJECT WILL I DEDICATE MY PRECIOUS TIME TO.

THE ONE DEEP INSIDE MY CONSCIOUS SELF IS EARNESTLY WORKING ON IT.

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Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman is published by Bodley Head. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.