Personal growth concept: Are we less optimistic as we age? November 1, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.Tags: achieving goals, life, optimism, personal development potential, pessimism, philosophy, psychology, writing
add a comment
Are young people by nature optimistic, cheerful, upbeat, and assured, whereas older people are inevitably pessimistic, gloomy, despairing, resigned, and worried?
Although some people seem to be naturally pessimistic or optimistic, for most of us our emotional outlook will vary with our real-time circumstances and how we treat the present moment and our present overall stage in life.
When we are young, life seems like a super-highway, with no speed limits and many off-ramps to significant opportunities. At this stage of our growth all things seem possible. There is “lots of time” to do most everything.
So, we tend to be broadly speaking, optimistic.
As we grow older, however, and as we see time literally starting to “run-out” we come to the realization that all things are not possible, there is not unlimited potential, because, simply put, we will not have enough time to do them all.
At this life-stage, we can still be upbeat and optimistic about “life” in general, but we now know that we need to establish our priorities on the basis of a time-available-focused algorithm.
In our self-improvement efforts, we do not come easily to realizing, and more important accepting, that life has a stop-sign.
— Dennis Mellersh
Personal growth challenge: Less theory, more implementation October 26, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.Tags: achieving goals, focussing, life, personal development potential, personal improvement, philosophy, procrastination, self-actualization, writing
2 comments
Study is important, but there’s not much use in having an ambitious personal growth program if we spend more time on the theory than we do on taking actions to actually improve ourselves. Spending too much time on the theories of self-actualization reduces the time available to accomplish our goals.
We can fool ourselves into thinking that studying can substitute for “doing” when in fact studying too much theory can be an enabler for procrastination.
Excessive time spent on studying “how to be organized”, for example, serves little purpose if we are leaving the action of paying our overdue bills until tomorrow.
Unless the act of studying is, in itself, a major part of our self-actualization program, then we are better off making action the biggest part of our focus.
— Dennis Mellersh
Personal Development Ideas 