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Fear: The enemy of our personal development potential March 4, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Development Potential.
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By Dennis Mellersh

The author of one of my personal development books suggests that fear is one of the primary causes of procrastination.

And from our own personal experience we each know that not only can fear result in “putting off” doing something until a later date, it can also result in putting it off altogether and never doing it.

As such, fear can be the enemy of our self-improvement efforts.

In his landmark television series, Civilization, Sir Kenneth Clark suggests that one of the primary causes of the collapse of two of the greatest advanced ancient civilizations, the Greek and Roman empires, was fear.

Fears such as invasion by the barbarians, fear of plague or war, and fear of the supernatural.

The result in Clark’s view was a significant decrease in citizens’ confidence and energy, the two main drivers necessary for building a successful and viable civilization with staying power.

Similarly, creating a successful personal growth program for ourselves requires confidence and energy, as well as a desire, coupled with effort, to push through our fear to accomplish things.

Paradoxically, we can be in the position of starting a personal development program in part to reduce our fears but then allow our fears to impede our progress.

How come?

Seth Godin believes that one of the major reasons that we do not follow through with our new project efforts is our fear that “This might not work.”

However, the need to push through our fears, such as ‘this might not work’ is easier to say than to do.

That’s when we need to draw on our energy.

Overdependence on virtual personal development libraries March 1, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Development Potential.
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By Dennis Mellersh

One of the traps we can fall into in building a collection of personal development knowledge materials is to rely too heavily on the online digital/cloud/ virtual versions of the materials.

In creating our personal databases of personal improvement information, for example, we may create shortcut after shortcut; add more and more favorites on our devices, and depend too much on services such as YouTube to be a safe depository for various media that we like.

Unless we make our own personal copies of this self-help media, it can all disappear in an instant.  And some of it cannot easily be replaced, if at all.

Personally, I have so many internet shortcuts in various folders that it takes my anti-virus program twice as long as it should when I do a complete computer scan. I should have this material on an external drive/storage device. Or print hard copies in the case of articles.

There are many reasons why online materials simply disappear. A few:

* Copyright disputes result in take-down orders
* Someone decides that some material is “inappropriate” for its service to carry
* The uploader loses interest and cancels their channel, website, blog, podcast
* The service/material is blocked because of territorial distribution rights
* Technical glitches wipe out large swathes of material on a server which was not properly backed up
* A service decides it is too much expense/trouble to archive older materials. And so, simply deletes all of it

Even “bricks and mortar” professional curatorial/custodial venues are not immune from suddenly deciding not to feature the personal development potential materials that we like.

I remember years ago my local library deciding to go on an update “modernizing” rampage and removing all VCR material and carrying only DVDs instead.

Of course there were numerous VCR tapes that I wanted to always be able to refer periodically; but now they were gone (sold? destroyed? given away?) and apparently were no longer stored centrally in the city’s library system.

If we want a permanent personal library of personal growth materials, it needs to be real, not virtual.