We are all people who need to develop. I didn’t know this until my last semester of college. My life’s identity was questioned. I didn’t know the answers. We did assignments that had no right answers. My professor made us uncomfortable on purpose to define values and create a mission. He had me foresee what my obituary statements would say. I didn’t want to think about death. I thought the teacher was crazy for making me do that. I failed that assignment.
I had never before reflected on myself. How I am unique from others. Who I am.
What does personal development mean? To improve awareness of identity. Its discovering potential to enhance quality of life. It contributes to the realization of dreams and aspirations.
We under index as humans. To know who we want to be in the future, we need to step back and look at what brought us to the present. If we are on auto-pilot, we many not even realize that we are in a rut.
Back before the Greek philosophers, people didn’t ask themselves these challenging questions. They settled with doing as those did before them. Being hunter-gatherers. Humans stayed in default mode. They didn’t think beyond of the “what-if’s” that could be present.
Life became challenging after asking philosophical questions, like ‘what is the meaning of life?’ Why do we ask these questions that do not have finite answers in the first place? It is in hopes that by doing this, we have a better direction of where we are going. Life is not going to be smooth sailing, so we need to add friction with hills to our bike ride.
It is a hard truth. Is that what enlightenment is? To pull our minds out from the day-to-day to realize that we were born to be on a unique path. We re-evaluate whether we are on that path. We ask the hard questions that our simplistic ancestors did not because we want to be better than them. We need to be. What is worthwhile in life is not easy.