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

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Leaders in Personal Development.
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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.

The creative process in action: Eric Hoffer’s diary January 20, 2007

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Growth Books.
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Eric Hoffer is one of my favorite authors, particularly in terms of being able to see the creative process in action. This is just a quick post I thought I would make as I have just re-discovered and am re-reading what to me is one of Hoffer’s most interesting books, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront. I talked about finding this book as an example of synchronicity in a post I did on synchronicity as it relates to the Law of Attraction.

This is one of those books that I enjoy re-reading every year or so. What makes this book different from others I have read on the act or process of creativity is that it is a diary. In the preface, Hoffer explains that he wrote in this diary during a period when he had some form of writer’s block and couldn’t seem to be able to transfer his thinking coherently into prose. So he kept a diary or journal, wrote in it mostly every day and used it to get down on paper some of the thought processes he was going through.

Hoffer was a longshoreman who worked unloading and loading ships on the waterfront, using his spare time largely for reading on a wide variety of topics and writing and forming his theories. During the period when he had trouble writing he explained that he had written some material on a book he was planning on intellectuals. However, as he notes,  “It soon became clear that my theories and insights would not come to more than forty pages of manuscript – enough for a chapter, but not a book.”

Hoffer explains that he began to suspect that all of his thinking throughout his adult life stemmed from a central preoccupation, but that he was concerned he might never discover what it was. Hoffer said, “I had to sort things out; talk to somebody. So, on June 1 1958, I began a diary. Toward the end of March 1959, I realized that my central subject was change.” He stopped writing in his diary in May of 1959.

For anyone interested in the creative process, this is a fascinating book. It’s about 180 pages, and is best read front to back as, being a diary; it is in a chronological format. The hardcover copy I have was published by Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, and is copyright 1969, by Eric Hoffer, so I assume that is the publishing date.