Personal Growth

Personal growth refers to the self-improvement of your skills, knowledge, personal qualities, life goals, and outlook. Whenever you seek to better yourself in any way – be it your temperament, your formal education, or your maturity, you are seeking personal growth.

We live in a world where comparison and competition have become the norm. As much as these are important facets in growth and life, they are attributing to our demise and poor mental health. What do I gain in competing with a person who is relying on stolen money and the government for their upkeep? Keep your eyes on your own paper. Does it make a difference what the next person does? See, if you compare yourself to the next man and they are doing better than you, you'll undermine your progress and feel like a pile of shite. If you compare yourself and you are doing better than them, you'll exaggerate how well you're doing. Ultimately, this is your race to run so only compare yourself to who you were yesterday and if - and that's a big IF - need be, compare yourself with a worthy rival; someone who pushes you to be better than you were yesterday. Life is a blank canvas: the point is to fill it with your own work. Your concern is to do the work, not to judge it. Your concern is to fall in love with the process of growing, not to grade it. Keep your eyes on your own paper!

Personal growth requires various virtues, two of which are knowledge and wisdom. Do we have the knowledge to help us grow? Are we wise enough to implement that knowledge?

According to the educator John Holt: Knowledge is like knowing the names of all the streets in a city. Wisdom is knowing how to get from one place to another. Knowledge is what you are acquiring from this blog and some others. Wisdom, however, comes with experience from implementing said acquired knowledge; it's that much personal.

The law of process says leaders develop daily, not in a day. Personal growth is therefore a daily ordeal - win the day. Personal growth means you, the person, has to put in the work, you cannot outsource it, but most importantly you can't say, "it's not my job." Our African ancestors have a saying for it, mbira yakashaya muswe nenyaya yekutumira which loosely translates to “the rock rabbit has no tail because it sent others for it during distribution!” Do you want growth? Put in the work.

Hold yourself to the highest standards. Choose actions of which you’ll be proud. How you get through this is more important than how quickly you get through the process. Sometimes growth requires ignorance, especially in the world dominated by social media. Be “selectively ignorant.” Ignore topics that drain your attention. Unfollow people that drain your energy. Abandon projects that drain your time. Do not keep up with it all. The more selectively ignorant you become, the more broadly knowledgeable you can be and the more you grow.

Learn from others. You don’t have time to make all the mistakes yourself. Learn from experience. You don’t have the talent to be great without practising. You must be thinking, didn't he say, 'don't compare yourself to others?' I did say that, and I mean it. there's a huge difference between comparing yourself to and learning from others. Comparing == measuring while learning == gaining. Be careful who you become implicated with. The true nature of a person always wins, even if it means they lose. Learn from your mistakes; too many people when they make mistakes keep stubbornly ploughing away and repeating the same mistakes. I believe in the motto try and try again but the way I read it is; try, and stop and think and then try again.

Personal growth is like formula one: you have to keep on growing and improving otherwise you're fucked. As humans, we often do enough to get out of a rut, and once we're out we become comfortable. This doesn't do us any good. The few people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they are exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they're obsessed with improvement. You must be thinking, how do I become exceptional when I have been dealt a bad hand? I’ve learnt that our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are but we’re responsible for who we become. The best helping hand you’ll ever get is on the end of your arm. At some point, you have to accept that it isn’t fair by design and just focus on creating your own luck. The irony of it all is someone else will look at your life and say it isn’t fair and you will think to yourself “They have no idea what I did to get here”. Life.

Your progress in life depends on many factors, one of the most important one is the ownership of your path. If you don’t take ownership of yourself and what you want, someone else will and their decision almost certainly won’t be in your favour. Ownership of your life needs that inner bastard - the ability to make the tough decision when you have to. I would know, I let the Doc go.

You don’t win anything in life by sitting back and accepting everything as is. You’ve got to push. Be a dog with a bone - never let it go. You must strive to develop yourself as evenly as possible because you're only as strong as your weakest point and only as disciplined as your most tempting vice.

Be good ✌🏾. Remember; my name is Shelton, and I am your friend.