Personal Development Ideas

Personal development and You Tube: A platform for self-actualization February 19, 2012

If you look at You Tube’s capabilities carefully, the service is actually, as with some other new communications platforms, a direct and indirect enabling tool for self-realization and numerous additional personal development concepts.

A few  of the personal development principles  actualized by You Tube include: entrepreneurship, getting things done, intention and manifestation, planning, problem solving, productivity, time management, self-education, self-discipline, communication – and the list goes on.

This occurs through direct content such as videos on “how to do” something in arts and crafts, for example, and indirectly through the totality of You Tube’s enablement of people’s ability to communicate in a new way and through its overall effect of  bringing  people into a dynamic self-realization platform.  The longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer, who was self-educated, often expressed a distrust of the “wisdom” of the elites. On the other hand, Hoffer had a great respect for the creative and problem-solving capabilities of the average person. You Tube is a testament to this underlying mass creativity potential.

In addition to a great deal of direct and educationally focussed personal development content being available through the service, such as a video teaching about the attributes of successful people, You Tube is also indirectly enabling a self-improvement and education function simply by exposing people to different things they have not previously experienced. And, people using You Tube are demonstrating that they are very open to these new experiences.

Of course, the intention of an older person posting a video involving some aspect of 1950’s music, was not likely to educate younger people on period music, but simply to put something on You Tube that the poster thought other people might enjoy. Often however, viewers of such videos will often comment that they had not realized how good such music was – in other words, they are learning something new as well as enjoying the music.

Overall, the aggregating effect has a positive impact on personal development for all of us using You Tube. There is also a very real curatorial benefit in preserving and archiving material that might otherwise be eventually lost or forgotten and not readily retrievable. You Tube is thereby serving an important stewardship and custodial purpose as well. This could be viewed as an example of unintended intention and manifestation.

People of different ages, cultural backgrounds, and education accomplishments, are stumbling across various types of media material they are unfamiliar with, and are discovering how good the quality of this material is. If you read the comments section provided with the videos it often shows that people are making real discoveries about topics they previously knew little about.

Both in video posting activity and in interactivity with each other in comments, people of diverse age, economic, cultural, and educational backgrounds are creating a unique global platform for self-realization.  The “You” in You Tube is significant – it is in many ways an interpersonal communications platform.

Presently, the service does not appear to have been bombarded with spam content and, hopefully, You Tube will continue to make strong efforts to curtail spamming activity, and thereby preserve what has become a strong tool for creativity and personal development.