Our personal development in general is how we really grow up, and ignoring that fact is a luxury that we cannot afford because in this world, anything that stops growing starts to decompose; it is a natural law; and with no doubt, we are not an exception to that. However, committing and achieving personal development became just a new fashion nowadays, a new way to impress friends, bosses, and life mates or partners.
People became more interested in the bold expressions of personal development and less concerned with the real content; and the whole story became just a commercial process.
In fact, the concept of personal development had been distorted in the recent few years by the business-wise mentality, and it became hard to find good sources to satisfy our needs for real personal development.
A lot of personal development spokesmen and authors gave us an impression that personal development is just an injection, or even a tablet that we would swallow, and then everything would be fine. They inject a lot of positive feelings and energy in our veins. They give us those unbelievable enormous hopes of our ability to do the impossible; according to them, each one of us is a special, unique, and with an exceptional great future. Finally, they feed us with a lot of soft skills and NLP[1] . Then, that is it, this is the science of personal development, and we just believe it!
All of that is just a tiny part of a bigger, deeper, and much more serious process. Personal development is the science and art of trying to make you the new one, and it gives you a new life where there are no conflicts between being ethical and being both happy and successful. In other words, where there is the right equilibrium between your ethics, your happiness, and your success.
“The real Personal Development is neither an injection nor a tablet that we will swallow, and then everything will be okay. It is a long trip that is worth it and needs hard efforts.”
The real personal development is somehow a science with laws and rules; however, it is also an art, which requires a high sense and taste.
If you really have a deep wish to commit some serious personal development, then you have to become that self-engineer who understands the codes of the process. Also, you have to be the artist who will use those codes to shape and paint the new person you wish to become, and be sure that one day you will be what you chose to be.
“We shape our ideas, models, and stereotypes; thereafter, they shape us. So, it is all up to you, and only you, to decide who you are.”
We should realize that personal development is a process that examines the questions of how to achieve real human development. How to make real, internal, and deep changes of individuals. How to enhance and transcend the man spiritually, mentally, and intellectually. How to do all of that without omitting the need for enhancing the behavioral skills.
The personal development major target is to produce the ones who are able to participate in changing the world, which sinks in materialism and makes it a better place for humans to live like real humans.
One day Henry Miller[2] wrote, “A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values.”[3]
We live in a decaying civilization where the real good values do not belong anymore. For irony, we call it “a modern life”.
Personal development should always be a tool to bring the lost real humans back to life. The real humans who know that they are not just pre-programmed machines act as a replaceable part of a crazy system, which in turn brings the benefits for the very few and drives the rest to be unmercifully burned.
That is what I believe the real personal development should be all about. But unfortunately, we were prevented from reaching our real personal development, we were intentionally misled; and in order to realize the real concept of our personal development, it is important to understand first how and why this false perspective has been formed; because unfortunately, there is some kind of deception happening here. ????
The roots of this false perspective in fact originate from a deeper problem in the modern culture itself that became the sacred mentality over the past few decades. This modern culture is based on materialism, maximizing the individuals’ benefits and pleasures, and maximizing the consumption; and it is being supported by vague and misleading justifications and holy slogans such as: The era of speed, competition and lack of resources, personal freedom, personal greatness, stardom, globalization… and so on.
The explosion of both the media and social media made it much easier for this culture to spread all over the world like a cancer. I do not think that I will sound dramatic if I said that this modern culture creates a flow of negative ethics that hit our souls with no mercy and forms one of the worst tsunamis that had ever hit humanity since Noah’s Flood.
A major result of this culture is the domination of the business-wise (or the business-centered) mentality, accompanied by the takeaway culture, which in turn is based on fast food, fast cures, partial solutions, and painkillers. And here comes one of the tributaries where this false perspective of personal development stems from: Take fast food and fast cure for your own soul, exactly as you do with your own body. Addict those moments of pleasure you feel when I give you this big dose of hope and big dreams, and come back later and ask me for more and more because I want to earn much more and more. Simply, our souls are being fed these fast foods, and we feel like being filled without a real feeding; our ego is being inflated, and our souls begin to gain unhealthy fatness.
However, this is not the whole story yet…
Preventing people from achieving their own true personal development is a game that has been played by the power-holders since the old times of history. Wherever you go, there will be those whales who hold the power, running the markets, controlling the economy, leading the media, and influencing the politics. The souls of those whales are fully saturated with this modern culture, and they embrace it to the bones. This culture is very beneficial for them, and they do everything they can to spread it in order to maximize their own profits in the first place, and justify it as they are participating in building a “brave new world”[4] !
Those whales encourage this false perspective of personal development directly and indirectly because for them it is a good chance for their employees to learn the effective skills needed to serve in the business entities they run. Also, it forms great integration with the malfunctioned and poorly structured educational systems being worshiped by the modern culture. These systems were structured to serve what the business needs in the first place, not the science as we were meant to believe. These systems, with great help from the media and the false personal development, all form together the individual’s mentality to be ready to embrace the role that the whales hope he will play, and unfortunately, most of us play the role with no objections!
When you play that role, it means that your mind is being molded to act according to the consumption model, and you are being tied by your own dreams of being able to have more and more luxurious things. Your primary target in this life becomes to try as hard as possible to survive, and to adapt with the corruption and inhumanity provided by this modern culture. You become ready to be just another replaceable piece within the corrupted systems or irresponsible organizations where the basic faith originates from worshiping the Dollar and embracing jungle law.
Playing that role also means that you become ready to serve in such places with no hesitation in using your own personal skills to please your masters or “Bosses”, regardless of what your own beliefs are; and regardless of the ethical legitimacy of these requests. You would be ready to do anything; you would use your skills to make anyone believe anything, and it would not matter whether it was right or wrong, as long as it is “legal” and you will not serve time in prison for it; and all of that is just for the sake of harvesting more Dollars.