Why most personal development won't work

How Many Things Have You Tried That Didn’t Work?

You’re here because you desire to become your best self, finally be able to feel proud of yourself and achieve your dreams. That’s where personal development can help…

emphasis on the word can.

In a way, I hate the way most people teach personal development skills.

Why?

Too much certainty and conviction.

Here’s what I mean:

Whenever you watch any personal development video or read an article, you’d hear most of them talk about their method as being the single best thing ever. Or even as if it’s the only thing that will ever work.

That’s simply NOT true!

Let me share an example of this.

Should You “Eat the Frog”?

Have you ever heard of this principle from Brian Tracy?

His idea is to take the most difficult and dreadful task on your to-do list and do it first thing in the morning. Once you get that thing out of the way, everything else is going to feel a lot easier by comparison and you’ll be more likely to do it.

Let me ask you:

Do you think this is great advice?

Honestly, it depends.

For some people, this will completely transform their lives!

For others, it’s disastrous for their wellbeing and productivity!

I fall into the latter category because I’m a night owl through and through. It’s actually 2 AM as I’m writing this newsletter for you. If you make me do my hardest work first thing in the morning, I can guarantee you it won’t be my best work, not by a mile!

And I’d completely hate it.

So, what do I do?

I do the exact opposite by focusing on the smallest and easiest task in the early morning. This way I can ease my way into the day and build momentum by getting some small tasks out of the way first.

See the point here?

Self Awareness Is a Superpower!

If there was one skill that I wish upon everyone, it would be self awareness.

The truth is:

We are all different, meaning that something that works great for me doesn’t necessarily work well for you (and vice versa). Self awareness is what allows you to pick the right methods for YOU to achieve your goals.

Self awareness is difficult to find however….

and even harder to teach, unfortunately.

Especially in these days where a lot of 3-braincelled people can’t even figure out if they’re men or women, let alone figure themselves out…

However, while I can’t teach self awareness, I can prompt your search!

Try asking yourself a few questions like:

• Am I more introverted or extraverted?

• Organised or chaotic?

• Are you the creative kind?

• Morning person or night owl?

• Emotional or logic oriented?

• Pragmatic or overthinking?

• And so on.

Note:

The way these questions are phrased, it sounds like they’re binary. However, they are NOT! My phrasing helps you see contrast, but in reality you can fall anywhere in between these. You can think of them like a scale of 1 (chaotic incarnate) to 10 (fully organised) for example.

These kinds of questions help you in thinking about the way YOU work best.

How to Take ANY Advice Smartly

Please, do me 1 favor:

Don’t ever take any advice blindly!

(That includes advice from me as well)

There are a few reasons for this:

1. They aren’t qualified: they lack the knowledge or skills required to guide you

2. Their values differ: their compass points West while yours points North

3. They don’t know you: as discussed, the advice might not be suited to you specifically

4. They have other motives: not everyone has your best interest at heart, looking at you mainstream media

However…

The opposite of this is not good either, which would be not taking advice from anyone and trying to figure everything out on your own. That way, you’d have to figure everything out by yourself.

Not ideal!

So, what’s the golden middle road?

In order to figure out if a piece of advice is beneficial for me, I use 2 things:

1. Skepticism

2. Curiosity

Firstly, I think through the 4 factors above as well as the advice above and knowing myself. This way, I can quickly rule out a lot of advice already that is unlikely to work out well for me.

Once it passes the initial filter, I apply curiosity:

My thinking goes into:

“This is interesting, and it sounds like it might work. In what areas of my life can I try this out? Are there specific ways in which I can take this advice or create my own version of this?”

And finally:

I experiment with it!

Taking on the advice, I apply it and see if it benefits me more than what I did earlier. If it does, I keep on doing it and if I find that it makes me worse (subjective call), then I revert back.

A Practical Example

Above, I talked about “Eat the Frog”.

This perfectly exemplifies my thinking process:

While I don’t know Brian Tracy personally, I do know him by reputation. Based on that, I can safely check of 3 out of 4 of the factors that I mentioned above.

The one unchecked is him not knowing me.

So, I need to figure out whether the advice is well suited for me, or not.

This is where I make sure I understand the advice and the reasons behind it. In this case doing the most difficult thing first (advice) because it gets the most dreadful thing out of the way and the other things on the to-do feel way easier in comparison (reason).

I combine this with self awareness.

From the breakdown of the technique, I can clearly see how it would work and why many people love it. However, I also know that I’m a VERY slow starter of my day and that I’m absolutely not a morning person.

Based on that, I figured this advice would not work well for me.

And in fact, based upon that, I started adding my own technique to my morning routine around snowballing my day by starting with the easiest tasks first thing in the morning.

Do you see how this would work?

Personally, I feel kinda bad about not being able to properly teach self awareness, given how personal it is. Hopefully this has given you some food for thought though!

Ps. On the topic of morning routines, here’s what I recommend.

No matter who you are, you’ll find useful insights in that video!

Voice Message of the Day
3 Productivity Habits of the Elite

Working harder will NOT help you achieve more!

Not on its own at least.

There are more important things than just how hard you work.

All highly successful people have a clear understanding of what it really takes to win at the highest levels. In this audio I’m sharing 3 crucial habits to implement if you want to get more done and achieve your goals and dreams!

Enjoy! :)

Some Terrible Personal Development Advice
And what to do instead!

This video I released today is the perfect example of this concept.

It covers 3 pieces of common personal development advice that is completely misguided. Perhaps you have fallen for these mistakes yourself… either way, watch this video because it will help you a TON with thinking about personal development more strategically!

Exercise: Become More Self Aware

This will be the easiest exercise you’ve EVER seen!

Which ironically makes it hard.

Let me preface this exercise by saying that we all tend to distract ourselves all the time. Think about it: When was the last time that you sat down and did absolutely nothing for more than 5 minutes?

This is the root cause of our global lack of self awareness:

Our world is so noisy that we can’t even hear ourselves!

So, here’s the exercise:

Literally do nothing at all.

Go and sit somewhere where you can be completely alone and you have nothing to distract yourself with. Just sit there and let your mind run free. Whatever thoughts come to mind, allow them in. Don’t judge. Don’t try to get them out of your head. Just observe.

You’ll learn a LOT about yourself when you learn to listen to yourself!

Crazy concept, I know.

Note:

When you’re doing this, you might want to set an alarm (and keep it in another room!) because it’s kinda hard to tell how much time has passed when doing this exercise. Aim for 20 - 30 minutes on alone time.