Choose Personal Development So You Can Move from Arbitrary to Exceptional | #PersonalDevelopment
Why is the self-help industry so popular? That’s because personal development is an essential part of every human being’s makeup. | #PersonalDevelopment
With so many people attempting to improve their lives in one way or another, it is no wonder the industry has grown by leaps and bounds over the years. Just how big is the self-help industry? How many hands are touching it?
The personal development industry is worth more than $10-billion every year in the United States alone. Worldwide it is a massive market. Billions of dollars of books are being sold every year and the professional speaking and training market is worth billions of dollars every year too.
Spending money on self-help books dwarfs all other categories of popular literature.
In fact, spending on best-sellers in this sector is greater than any other commercially published fiction book category – yes, even greater than romance novels!
Why is the self-help industry so popular?
We all want to live happy fulfilling lives but the world around us can sometimes get in the way.
We have a desire to improve. We want to get better. To grow and evolve. We are always striving to be better than we were yesterday. This is the reason that personal development has become such a big business.
Self-help books, professional speakers and seminars, lifestyle coaches, personal development programs, personal coaching and so on have never been more popular. We work long hours, stress out about money, relationships and work-life balance. Life is stressful. We need help to reduce stress, anxiety and guilt that can be self-inflicted.
We also have to admit we do not always help ourselves when it comes to self-improvement.
The interesting thing about the self-help market is that it changes every year. The self-help books of the 80s are not the same as the self-help books of today, and this will affect their popularity.
Many people in the modern world find it hard to go out into society and make friends, so instead they look for advice in a book or online. Some people prefer to spend thousands of dollars on one-on-one coaching or hiring expensive coaches.
We all need a little help every now and then, whether it be with a project, a situation or planning for the future. Of course, that can also make things confusing.
The purpose of self-help is to help people improve themselves on many different levels and this can leave many people unsure on where to start. In fact, because of the amount of information available through books, courses, seminars and coaches are endless, it’s difficult to know where to begin.
1. Success is a Lifelong Journey of Self-Improvement
Essentially, we have to become good at navigating this existence so we can survive and thrive. One of our biggest drivers is to grow so we can find security, significance, fulfillment, etc.
Humans are built to grow and innovate. It is our nature to improve so that we can be useful to one another.
Therefore, learning is so important if you want to get ahead personally and professionally.
In the workplace and open market, usefulness is rewarded.
The more you contribute and the less you take from an enterprise, the more valuable you are to that enterprise.
You can learn the skills of your craft so you can do the job you are tasked with. But the world of enterprise is a little more complicated than that. Learn to get along with others so that the collective effort can yield the desired outcome, whatever that may be. Learn to manage your emotions. Work on your self-esteem. One has to know how to play the game of life so that one can navigate it with elegance and eloquence.
To manage this, one has to be on a lifelong journey of personal development. Initiative has no age deadline.
If we have a look at a post-Covid world, many people will lose their jobs and their careers. This means they have to pivot and find other ways of becoming useful again. They will have to have to reinvent themselves and perhaps take on careers different from what they trained for.
They’re will have to read more, watch more, and learn more so they can survive and thrive in a world that has changed.
The quicker they can adapt, the quicker they can become useful again, the better for all of us.
Personal development is an approach of self-improvement which helps us to grow and evolve. At any point in our lives, we can always be improving ourselves, whether it’s in our health, behavior or skills.
When we reach one goal, we are usually motivated to reach another. We are motivated because we want to grow. To improve oneself is to improve the quality of your life, it’s a key towards happiness and success.
This is also the reason that personal development blogs are becoming so popular. We can read about what other people have learned, their triumphs and mistakes.
We can read stories about how other people have grown and developed. They learn from other’s experiences, and we learn from their stories.
Personal development is a way of life.
It is a lifestyle that means that you always want to become better and more successful. There are a number of ways to go about this.
Of course, there are certain tactics and strategies you can use in order to improve your situation. But personal development also includes more than just the actionable items and the “how-to’s.”
Personal development is important for everyone. At its core, it’s about understanding yourself better.
And then acting that self-knowledge in the real world to achieve your goals and dreams.
Before we can be successful in our careers, personal development is included. A common concept that many people preach about is the phrase “be the best you can be”. This implies that you should follow your dreams and do what you are meant to do.
Your purpose on earth is very important.
Following your dreams will put you on a path of self-improvement, which is the key to accomplishment.
Personal development can be a variety of things. It may mean embracing your spirituality. Or it could mean getting the education you need to be competitive in your field.
Whatever you do, it is important that you continue to grow and improve. This journey will help to open new doors for you and lead you towards success.
Personal development is a journey of growth and change. It’s a path to improve ourselves and develop a better version of who we are.
Civilization has emerged because, in spite of all the negative factors, human beings remain hopeful for a better future.
2. Create Your Own Personal Development Road Map to Stay Relevant
But if we will spend time on growing as a person (as we should), let’s do it in an informed way so we focus our attention on what will give us the most impact.
Developing yourself and getting ahead in the world is more than hard work, more than dreaming and more than luck. It’s a combination of many factors.
Life’s responsibilities, family, and work demands are time-consuming and can make it difficult to set aside more time to enhance your skills development. For many, a working day starts at the dawn of day and ends at dusk. Staying in cities, time in peak traffic sucks up the hours. Arriving home exhausted after a long working day leaves little time for personal development, and family life shouldn’t be neglected.
Some master this fast-paced environment and jump to opportunities for learning.
They attend conferences and seminars on weekends and learn from books.
Learning organizations urge employees to show learning initiatives and know that knowledgeable workers with a mindset towards personal development are an asset to the company.
Create your own learning road map so you stay relevant and useful in the future.
The only way to grow and have more than an even chance of achieving one’s goals is to work on the process.
Setting goals is important to keep you motivated and on track. However, it can be difficult to figure out what step to take next that will actually help you achieve your goals.
Creating a personal development plan can help you stay productive because you won’t be all over the place with your energy and ideas.
Someone once said that, “self-improvement should be like flossing your teeth, painful at the time but something you need to do”. This is how most of us feel about improving ourselves in some way. But the get up and go isn’t always there, so taking action on things that could make you a more effective professional has to be planned.
Create your own self-improvement road map to stay relevant. Create a personal development action plan to accelerate your learning.
Adapting to change is integral to success. We can never assume a job opportunity is secure, friends and colleagues can move on at any time, really anything can happen.
The threats of automation being the most current topic, jobs have become very vulnerable to being replaced by artificial intelligence. Therefore, it is essential that we develop ourselves constantly to stay relevant so that we can remain competitive in the job market as well as help the organizations we work for stay competitive.
How do you ensure that you become an expert? More importantly, how can one avoid becoming an “outdated” expert?
Personal development plans are a way of defining how you will learn and grow. It’s cliché, but it’s real: If you don’t have a plan, then you’re planning to fail.
Why is personal development action planning important? Because in order to improve, you need to take consistent action.
You can’t just think about the steps you want to take – you need a plan.
Saying something like “I want to start running” and then not doing anything else after means you’ll never be a runner. Ever.
Creating a personal development action plan isn’t just helpful for your professional life, it can also improve your personal life. You don’t need to be a millionaire or CEO to have personal goals and make improvements in your life.
We each carry out the methods of self-improvement in our lives, but why not get a process or structure in place to make continuous improvements? In order for this process or structure to work for you, it needs to be flexible and applicable for your situation.
Lack of constant development can lead to failure in any field. Humans are creatures of habit; therefore, our habits develop over time if not broken. We all have a tendency to find hobbies, interests, and even careers that we like and become proficient at them.
Yet without a personal development action plan, we are at risk of becoming stale and stagnant. We also run the risk of reaching a career ceiling because we fail to see outside our own box.
3. Hard Work is Not a Popular Concept
Hard work, failure, and process have not been popular concepts in the 21st century.
Many self-help gurus stress that one should focus on the outcome through visualization, dreaming, and will power alone.
Writer, William Arthur Ward, said, “If you can imagine it, you can create it. If you can dream it, you can become it.” This kind of motivational motherhood has become the growth philosophy of the 21st Century and has birthed thousands of books and movements that put dreams, attraction, imagination, and outcomes before work and process.
The seminal work that brought this into mainstream self-improvement consciousness is the ‘law of attraction’ movement created by Rhonda Byrne’s book, The Secret (based on a documentary of the same name), which was published in November 2006. To date, over 30 million copies have been sold. And there’s no sign that the sales will slow down anytime soon. It may not have sold nearly as much as Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich which has sold over 80 million copies since it was first published in 1937.
Many contenders in this genre will deliberately go unmentioned.
In today’s fast-paced world, many of us have been conditioned to believe that success is obtained instantaneously and does not require a lot of effort. We are surrounded by instant coffee, microwave dinners, and 30-second abs.
But the truth is that success never comes overnight.
It is important to know that success does not happen by itself. No successful CEO achieved success without taking the appropriate action, which includes hard work. All progress requires effort. If you want to achieve your goals and live a better life, be prepared for struggle.
We live in an instant gratification society where people expect everything to come easily and are therefore unwilling to put in the effort required for long-term success. But hard work doesn’t have to be a foreign concept.
Sooner or later, each one of us has to face the fact that success is not going to happen by itself, and that we must struggle in order to achieve that success.
You are going to fail. You are going to struggle. You will have to work extremely hard for everything you accomplish.
Success is not a matter of luck. It takes you weeks, months, even years to achieve your goals. Achieving success in business and personal life requires that you learn from mistakes.
There is not something like instant success.
Success is the result of sustained effort, and sustained effort will lead to success – if you stick with it long enough. The investments that we make in ourselves always produce a payoff. Maybe not right away, but eventually, the results will come.
Overnight success is a big myth. Hard work, process, failure, and everything that goes into it are essential for accomplishment.
There is a mindset out there: “If I just get that idea, then I will be successful.” It’s a lie. If you do not put in the effort to execute that idea, you are not going to be successful. Period.
So many people think that hard work is the opposite of success.
That sounds unbelievable, but true. Every time you hear about somebody landing a good job by luck, getting rich overnight because they invested in some new and incredible system or becoming famous without even trying it spurs on the “I don’t need to try” philosophy.
Some people consider hard work a nice-to-have factor, not a need-to-have factor. They don’t think that the effort you put into your craft or business will ever pay off, but it does. What most people fail to recognize is that there is not something like quick success or overnight success ― there is only sweat and tears and eventually some sort of payoff.
But dilligence is something that we should all strive to. It will make you better. Stopping working hard, stops you from improving and reaching a higher level of success.
Resisting failure will stop you from trying harder.
And not understanding the idea of a process, or not liking it, will stop you from moving forward and getting better every day.
The concept of hard work can sound boring, but it is what gives birth to greatness. It doesn’t mean being busy at all times or hustling your way to fame.
It means keeping on top of things and pushing your limits until you’re ready to break them.
It is going to take a lot of time, a lot of failures, and a lot of false starts. These are things that a majority of people will not be able to deal with. They want the dream of success, but they don’t want to go through the failures, the tedious process, or the struggle.
People also don’t want to know that most of these overnight successes have actually failed a few times before they reached the top. They are not actually overnight successes.
The number one reason that brings people to where they want to be is sweat.
Success is a chain of failures. It is not an instant process where success will come out of nowhere. You will need to put your back into it, but it will be worth it in the end. There are millions of stories out there from successful people who worked so hard to achieve their success.
But there are some that think with the snap of a finger, they can have success on their hands…wrong.
So many people have been misled into thinking they can just pull up their favorite app or website, upload a video of them singing or dancing, and then become an instant worldwide sensation. The more you learn about success, the more you realize that there is no such thing as an easy journey. If something was really easy to achieve, everybody would do it.
But there are lots of people out there who are too comfortable with mediocrity and afraid of risks and failure. You need to be an open-minded person or you will never be successful in life or in your career.
4. A Growth Mindset by Developing Abilities Through Practice
Whilst positive thinking, positive attitudes, dreams, and goals are important to oil one’s motivation, many personal development philosophies miss out on achieving one’s goals.
One can sit in a room and visualize one’s outcomes, but without some kind of forward-moving process and action, it is doubtful that goals will be achieved.
One of the most helpful texts is a book written by Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
Here she argues that success in almost every area of human endeavor can be massively influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. Those that have fixed mindsets and believe that their abilities are fixed, will find it harder to improve themselves and flourish than those with a growth mindset. People who believe that they can develop their abilities through practice have a growth mindset. She’s arguing for people to work on developing themselves.
The ‘law of attraction’, focusing solely on outcomes, is not a sustainable model for any kind of long-term success. American football coach, Vince Lombardi was probably closest to the mark when he said, “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
There are thousands of excellent books that deal with self-help. Some of the most popular books are:
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R. Covey (25 million+ copies sold to date)
- Who Moved My Cheese – Spenser Johnson (23 million+ copies since 1998)
How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie (15 million copies and created one of the largest training organizations in the world).
5. 10 000 Hours and a Bit of Luck
Self-improvement is a process based on a series of incremental learning. The better one becomes at a process, the more chance one has of succeeding.
This argument is not entirely true. If hard work and process alone were the recipes to success, then surely the most menial of laborers should be the most successful, shouldn’t they? They work hard and for long hours. But their pay and lifestyle are not commensurate with their efforts.
A personal development book that goes a long way to answering this puzzle is Outliers: The Story of Success (circa. 2008) by Malcolm Gladwell. The premise is that it takes deliberate process work (10 000-hour rule) and then a bit of luck to be successful. If Leonardo da Vinci never spent thousands of hours on his craft and had the good fortune to gain the patronage of the wealthy Medici family in Florence (they’re also known as the Godfathers of the Renaissance), he may never have achieved what he did.
The Lebanese-American essayist and author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb echoes the same sentiment. He asks and answers why the usual ‘successful’ entrepreneurs … Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs and the like succeeded (financially, at least)? Taleb points out that there are hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs in the graveyard of failure who have had more opportunity, better bloodlines, more education than any of these ‘successful’ icons. Why are the Bill Gates’ of this world successful and not them? He came up with one word: Randomness. They just had a bit of luck too.
Being in the right place at the right time is a vital factor.
6. Today’s Marketplace Demands a Lot from Employees
With the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, there will probably be a big shrinkage in the professional speaker market for live events. Many trainers and speakers will go online and run their programs this way. So, how training will happen is changing. Learning Apps will become more popular as will online training.
Today’s marketplace demands a lot of its role players and without ongoing learning, employees fall behind on minimum requirements.
Whether technical knowledge is on the table or shaping up the induction course offered by your company, training is helpful in all its simple and complicated facets.
First, let’s consider a common myth about training. Yes, it finds its home in the human resources function, but employees need to be enlightened as to the importance of taking up the responsibility of personal learning and not waiting on the boss to do so for them.
They need to be inspired to make personal development a lifelong personal mission and it can be as simple as reading books.
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