Why Personal Development Matters

I’ve seen many articles recently about why personal development doesn’t matter because you should be grateful for what you already have and enjoy the little things.

While I agree that we can be happy with whatever we have at any moment, I think that stopping there without pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone it’s a huge mistake that stops our growth. In reality it’s too simple to accept any fact as given without trying to improve, and it doesn’t matter if your current situation is good or bad.

So what’s is the role of personal development in all this? Well, personal development, or personal growth, whatever, it’s simply the process that moves yourself from point A to point B in your growth. It lets you discover new things and emotions that you couldn’t have seen before because of your limitations.

But what happens when you ignore your growth? It’s very easy to find a response to this question, you only need to look at those people who ignore their core areas of development and see how they looks and act.

Let’s look at a few of them together:

Intelligence

From day 0 of your life, you have been exposed to new things to learn, like language learning, math, science, etc. This kind of exposition eventually have stopped or will stop in your twenties when you’ll leave school to enter the business world unless you constantly study new things after you leave school.

There’s a common belief that our brain stops to grow after age 20 because we have reached its maximum potential. In reality most people’s brain stops to grow at that age simply because they don’t exercise it like they did in the past. This is a well established fact along scientists. The effects of this bad habit are clear: you loose your memory abilities; you are not able to concentrate on difficult tasks like you did before; and many more. This process is of course gradual, and it varies a lot from people to people, but eventually if left untouched it goes to the same direction.

You may wonder what happens instead to people who continues to study and practice new things. Well, if you look at history those people will be able to perform important tasks even better than before and some of them will be able to win special prizes at an age when one should usually retire. But best of all, their intelligence will still grow at any age.

Physical Development

Another important area to develop is your body. You can’t pretend to stay fit without training, and you can’t pretend to stay healthy if you don’t pay attention to your most important asset. Both training and proper diet are important to prevent cardiovascular problems, injuries and a lot of other common diseases. Giving up bad habits like smoking and alcohol it’s vital for your body’s integrity.

Other Skills

There are many other skills where it’s important to grow, like spirituality, sociality, problem solving and more. It’s up to you to select those areas where you need more improvement and to work on them until you’re ready to move to something else.

Of course it’s important to be happy with what you already have, but that should not be an excuse to stop yourself from achieving more and more in your life.

Posted on August 27 2009

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