It’s hard to describe how I feel about personal development becoming the new black. On the one hand it is obviously pleasing to see people paying attention to becoming better by the day, while on the other, seeing how personal development alienates one person from another, as a concept, it easily becomes less than savory.
Being a productivity junkie you have probably fought against the 24 hour time frame time and again. How to get more things done, how to enjoy more results, yet still having the time to enjoy a little leisure on the side, still having the chance to pursue things that are not at all related with time management and constant improvement.
And giving the length of one day, 24 hours that is, we are unaware of the fact that time is all we have. We have plenty of it, in fact. And let me repeat myself as to stress the point – plenty of it!
If you share a statistician’s obsession with charts, you will come to notice that every long term success depends almost entirely on applying what works time and again over a long period of time. The long term concerns itself with the habits, dedication, extended motivation and drive to act. It is often times tightly linked…
I myself am terrified of staying still. I came to resent status quo as much as I once tried preserving it. From what I can tell reminiscing about it, status quo meant, at least from a previous point of view and in the context of improving oneself, reaching the pinnacle in personal development and trying to remain there.
But realizing that personal development is never about the goal, and instead cherishes the moment of progress, the journey of upgrading itself, it became clear that status quo would mean eventual retrogression.
If you are into personal development for a while now, it is most likely that you’ve already noticed the somewhat egocentric context in which it is being adopted.
Namely, we are conditioning ourselves to be entirely self-dependent, learning how to live by our rules and standards as we go along the way. Some people are even following their “made up” rules to the point of being religious about it.