Let Personal Development be “Personal”

I’ve been blogging about personal development for a while now, and about how you could make money with your character so that you can enjoy true success.

However, the reality is that not everyone will be a master of personal development. There will be some who will continue to admire others without taking any actions towards developing themselves, some will continue to emulate the great people before us and exceed the results of all the personal development bloggers combined, some will continue to love themselves, their family, their friends even with apparent flaws. So then what’s the real purpose behind the entire buzz about self growth? Mind you, according to Wikipedia, the United States alone has about $11 billion dollar market for personal development. That’s enough to feed 180 million children in South Africa for a whole year!

Let’s face it, there are close to 7 billion people on earth (6.793 billion to be exact, according to the U.S. Census Bureau), not everybody will be great and wonderful. Not that we don’t want it to happen, but it just won’t unless somebody comes up with a technology that would imbue everyone’s brain with the foolproof success mindset. And we can continue to believe it will, and it might, but most likely not when we’re still alive. So, what can we do?

Don’t do everything

You don’t need every personal development skill to be successful. Let me explain. Firstly, success is relative to each individual. For most people, it might mean having a lot of money/power by being a popular celebrity/politician figure with a lot of fans/supporters. However, if you’re reading this, I’m sure you know that you’re the one who defines your own success. A person’s trash might be someone else’s treasure, as the saying goes. For instance, if a person evaluates his success based on his relationship with the family, and he has very positive and wonderful family relationships, then he’s successful in his own terms, even though he’s not a very confident person. As you can see here, being confident is important overall, but it’s not essential to a person’s success. Think about this, if Thomas Edison focused on all the personal development skills in the world, we might still be living with candles at night! As far as I can tell, he had only 2 extremely amazing traits: passion and perseverance. And that’s all it took for Edison to successfully invent the light bulb.

Leave your personal footprints on your journey

Bottom line is, don’t read all the personal development books and blogs out there to find out what you should do to develop yourself. There are a gazillion things you can do this moment to improve yourself! Instead, search within your inner self and figure out what success is like to you: feel it, write it down, say it out loud. Then, search for that particular piece of information in the bookstore or the internet. You will gain much, much more in the shortest period of time. Finally, I don’t think either of us is perfect. But if you keep this idea in mind, I’m sure you’d find the success that’s ultimately dear and personal to you down the road. That’s why it’s called “personal” development!

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