Personal Development Is A Waste Of Time

by Hans Hageman

Tomorrow, I’ll pick up the thread of “Well-Formed Outcomes.” Notre Dame is playing, so I thought I’d just put up a short post about something that’s been bugging me.

Post Length
Before I talk about the lie of personal development, I just want to note something. I’m a big fan of Seth Godin’s blog and the 300 Words A Day Blog. My intention is to blog more frequently with shorter, more cogent, and pithier posts. Let’s see how it goes!

Personal Development
The concept of personal development presumably carries with it the burden of improving who you are. You need to add things to the existing model of you. Rather than adding things, how about striping things away? How about limiting your media-created desires? How about getting rid of the clothes and “toys” that other people convinced you that you needed? How about getting rid of the “friends” who do nothing but vampirically suck out your energy?

Trust
maybe if we trusted our bodies, our intuition, and our experience, we might find that we have everything that we needed. It’s less about what we should be doing and more about fully focusing on our current experience. As Timothy Gallwey talked about, we need to find a game worth playing and surround ourselves with people who will challenge us to bring out our God-given gifts. Anything else is someone else’s trance.

Are you engaged in personal development right now? What are the emotional and material things that you could give up that might show a better Return On Investment?

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Value – What’s Yours?

by Hans Hageman

This post is short and (hopefully) sweet – á la Seth Godin. I’ve talked about “values” in the past. This one is about VALUE. Perhaps it’s the ravages of middle age but I am losing my interest in potential. Talk to me about what value you bring NOW. In fact, someone may not have the entry level skills for a retail job, much less the ability to survive TEOTWAWKI (go ahead, look it up!). If you have the desire to be of value to your community, then you are the kind of person I want to be around.

When someone wants to be of value, they are seekers – they have to be curious. Integrity is more important to them than having the opportunity to show their cleverness. They work to be a part of the community. All I know is that when I’m done, and to paraphrase Albert Einstein, I would “rather be a man of value than a man of success.”

talent