How do I actually become a better person?

The short answer Stop trying to add virtues and start subtracting. You don't become a better person by bolting good qualities on like new tools; you become one by cutting away the vigorous, healthy growth that's spending you in directions that aren't yours—so the strength goes where it should. A gardener improves a tree by cutting living wood, not dead, because the tree has only so much to give, and half of growing well is choosing what not to feed. The self worth becoming is mostly already there, under the parts you keep watering out of habit.

The longer answer

Watch someone who knows how to prune a fruit tree and, at first, it looks like vandalism. The tree is full—leafed, vigorous, throwing shoots everywhere—and they take the saw and the secateurs to it and cut away what looks like the best of it: strong straight growth, healthy wood, whole limbs doing nothing wrong except growing where they weren't wanted. When they're done the tree is smaller and barer, and it will fruit better than it ever would have left alone.

Because a tree has only so much to give, and an unpruned one gives it to everything equally—a hundred shoots, all mediocre, a crowd of branches shading each other into a tangle that ripens nothing. The cut is not punishment. It's a decision about where the tree's one finite strength should go. You take off the vigorous water-shoots precisely because they're vigorous; left on, they'd eat the vitality the fruit needs. You cut the healthy limb crossing the centre because an open, light-filled middle is worth more than one more arm of leaves.

I think becoming a better person works the same way, and that most people have the direction backwards. We treat it as addition—another discipline, another virtue, another habit bolted on, a self improved by accumulation. But you are a tree, not a workshop. You have one finite strength, and most of what's wrong isn't an absence to be filled; it's a vigorous growth to be cut. The busyness that passes for diligence. The helpfulness that's really a need to be needed. The straight strong ambition growing exactly where it starves everything else. These aren't dead wood—that's the hard part. They're your healthiest shoots, and they're the ones costing you the fruit.

So the work is subtraction, and it's harder than addition because it asks you to cut living things you're proud of. Not the obvious vices; those are the dead wood, easy to see and easy to want gone. The real pruning is giving up a good quality that has grown to the wrong size, so the strength it was eating can finally reach the thing you were actually for.

Whether there's a shapely, fruitful self waiting under all that growth, or only more wood, I can't promise you—some trees are mostly tangle. But I have never met a life that got better by being added to, and I've met a few that got better by being cut back. It may be so. It may not.