Personal growth: Is everyone reading self-help books these days? April 13, 2018
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.Tags: achieving goals, inspiration, life, lifestyle, personal development ideas, personal development potential, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, self-awareness, self-improvement, writing
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I was recently reading a newspaper interview of a novelist, and one of the questions was, “What is the latest self-help book you have read?”, which struck me as significant because it implies or assumes that everyone is reading self-help books as part of their regular routine.
And maybe it’s true: I just got a personal development book, The Happiness Equation, out of the library a few days before I read the article.
The question we might ask, however, is that with all the self-improvement material we have already read, how much more advice do we really need to manage our lives effectively?
I suspect that most of us actually don’t need more information in order to know what we need to do; it’s more a matter of inserting an action component into our existing knowledge, and then taking concrete “do” steps towards our goals.
I tend to think that many of us read books about self-actualization, listen to podcasts on the topic, and watch videos with similar content, because we enjoy reading about the topic as a form of lifestyle philosophy, much as we might like reading mystery novels, or adventure stories.
Maybe we don’t actually need as much life-guidance as the abundance of personal development books might seem to indicate.
Maybe we’re all OK just as we are.
Dennis Mellersh
Personal growth: Desiring what we have not yet earned April 11, 2018
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.Tags: Confucius, David Hinton, inspiration, life, personal development ideas, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, The Four Chinese Classics, writing
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If we have not yet been promoted to the job we want, if we can’t seem to reach the goal we are working on, if our life in general is not all that we want it to be, if we are generally dissatisfied with the progress we are making in our personal growth goals, Confucius reminds us that perhaps we need to invest more effort into what we seek.
Confucius in the Analects:
“The Master said, ‘Don’t worry if you have no position: worry about making yourself worthy of one. Don’t worry if you aren’t known and admired: devote yourself to a life that deserves admiration.’” (1)
(1) As translated by David Hinton in his book, The Four Chinese Classics
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