Are you tormented by depression, do you hate life and are looking for the culprits of your failures: do you blame your lack of spine on your greenhouse upbringing, on your bad job on your picky boss, on your loneliness on selfish friends who are not interested in your problems? And in general, for every incident you always have a million culprits besides yourself? But in fact, the source of all your failures is you, only you and no one else. And only you can fix everything.
To change your life for the better, change yourself first. It is for this purpose that personal self-development exists. First, let's figure out what this concept actually means.
What is self-development?
Self-development is a conscious process that a person carries out without any external support, using exclusively his moral and physical resources in order to improve his potential and realize himself as an individual. Self-development is impossible without:
— setting specific goals for yourself;
- presence of beliefs;
— creating attitudes for action.
An identical and inextricably linked concept with self-development is personal growth. This is a person’s self-education, during which he improves his positive qualities, his actions become more effective and, as a result, personal potential increases significantly, which helps to achieve success in all areas of life.
"Founding Fathers" of the Science of Success
Many believe that the emergence of the cult of success is directly related to the so-called American dream, that the American dream is success embodied in money.
However, this statement is far from the truth. The phrase “American Dream” was first mentioned in “The Epic of America,” a weighty book by James Adams that he wrote in 1931. In it, the author writes that the people of the United States have “the American dream of a country where every person’s life will be better, richer and fuller, where everyone will have the opportunity to get what they deserve.”
This postulate goes back to the text of the Declaration of Independence, which formulated the basic principle of life in America, where every citizen is endowed with “certain unalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
This pursuit of happiness is the American Dream, and that has always been the beauty of it - it is still happiness.
a much deeper and broader concept than the opportunity to earn more money. The creators of the Declaration of Independence—religious people, by the way—understood this very well.
The “American Dream” acquired its pragmatic meaning later, when the United States began to develop rapidly, turning into a country of opportunity where everyone could get rich if they put in the required amount of effort.
America's image of the land of opportunity has been preserved to this day: we all know dozens of stories of famous people who started with a “dollar in their pocket” and then became millionaires. Andrew Carnegie, George Soros, Oprah Winfrey, Ralph Lauren - the list goes on almost endlessly.
What does it consist of?
The concepts of “self-education”, “personal potential”, “success” sound quite abstract. All this can be achieved only through specific actions. And personal growth and self-development are processes that give positive results of both a moral and material nature, only under the condition of constant painstaking work on oneself. Let's take a more specific look at what actions are required of us in order to change for the better.
Self-development is undoubtedly a big and important step, but you also need to create an action plan for yourself to achieve your goals. Don't think that your life can change in one second or in a day. It takes a lot of time to accomplish great things. But if you try hard, the result will certainly meet all your expectations.
Personal self-development can be divided into five stages, which are inextricably linked:
1) awareness of its necessity;
2) study of needs;
3) self-knowledge;
4) drawing up a strategy;
5) actions.
The self-development program requires a careful approach to each of its points. Let's look at them in more detail.
Who else criticized positive thinking?
There were many opponents not only to the philosophy of success but also to its individual epigones. For example, Everett Leo Shostrom was an ardent opponent of Dale Carnegie and even wrote the book “The Manipulative Man,” which was popularly nicknamed “Anti-Carnegie.”
He pointed out that eternal movement forward, as well as perceiving the world through rose-colored glasses, leads more likely to fatigue and wrong actions, rather than to happiness.
Shostrom, in the best traditions of Tolstoyism, almost called for inaction as a means of salvation for man:
“From childhood, we are instilled with respect for vigorous activity, effort and hard work. However, let's not forget the value of humility and effortlessness, which can certainly be considered a deeply rooted human quality that helps a person experience considerable satisfaction. “Relaxation of effort”, or humility, was defined by James Bugenthal as “voluntary agreement without effort or effort, without deliberate concentration and without making decisions.” He believes that “relaxation of effort” is the most important condition for actualization.”
Modern training gurus also periodically come under fire from criticism. So, in 2005, Steve Salerno released the book “SHAM: How the Self-Improvement Movement Made America Helpless,” in which he seeks to expose the training industry with a global turnover of $8.5 billion.
He points out that the vast majority of visitors to various trainings then return again and again to their guru’s show to experience a spiritual uplift - that is, a person may receive a dose of adrenaline at such performances, but this in no way solves his accumulated problems.
All these trends did not go unnoticed by fiction. For example, in 1999, the famous English writer Christopher Buckley released an excellent book called “My Master is a Broker,” full of sarcasm and satire on all kinds of self-development techniques. In the story, the main character, a drunken broker from Wall Street, decides to take a break from the hustle and bustle in a Catholic church. However, even there he is haunted: the temple is on the verge of ruin, and he has to use all his skills to turn the monastery into a thriving institution. Along the way, he also decides to write a book in which he talks about the “seven and a half laws of spiritual and financial growth.”
By the way, here are a couple of them:
“An important conclusion that directly follows from the Second Law: IF YOU ARE GOING ON THE WRONG PATH, TURN BACK!”
"Last Law, Amendment to the Seventh Law: 'The only way to get rich with a book on how to get rich is to write it: 'VII 1/2 ...OR BUY THIS BOOK.'
Doubts
Inside each of us sits an evil censor who criticizes any of our decisions. Even if at first glance it looks like the most correct and rational of all possible, we still ask ourselves the question: “Or maybe we shouldn’t?”, “Are you sure?”, “Let’s not take risks?”
The voice of doubt... In some cases, it really saves us from making rash decisions, but sometimes it prevents us from making a leap towards our dreams. How to deal with it? His main enemy is desire. Only within him lies the strength sufficient to overcome any doubts. It’s not for nothing that they once said: “If you really want to, you can fly into space.”
Desire gives us an inexhaustible source of energy, it inspires and inspires us, makes us fight for what we really need, kicks everyone out of their comfort zone. Only armed with a real sincere desire can you overcome any doubts.
Laziness
Laziness is another problem of self-development. But it doesn’t exist, it’s a kind of placebo, a fiction. But wrong desires and dreams are quite real. They are the ones who poison our lives, forcing us to sit still and not strive anywhere.
If you don’t have the incentive, then you won’t have the desire either. How can you change something if you don’t want it with all your heart? No way. Dreams are the gasoline of our self-development. The nourishment they give us is equal to their scale. And if the dream is useless, then you won’t be able to really refuel from it.
But when you have a truly worthwhile goal, you don’t even want to think about any laziness. After all, we are driven by a strong thirst for change.
If you don't have a truly inspiring dream, find one. If it doesn’t work out, change your social circle, reach out to people with large-scale goals, and you yourself will have the same ones. Fight for your dreams. And you will certainly be able to defeat laziness!
How to become rich and what does God have to do with it?
The “founding father” of the science of self-development and achieving cherished goals was Wallace Wattles, born in 1860. Coming from a poor farm in Illinois, he was educated in an American country school, where children were taught to read, count and write in the elementary grades, and in the middle grades they were taught geometry and US history. Wattles was an enthusiastic person and loved to read: of his own free will, he became acquainted with the works of Descartes, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Swedenborg, Emerson and many other philosophers.
All this, as his daughter Florence later wrote, led Wattles to reconsider his views on life: he joined the New Thought movement, which was just gaining strength in the second half of the 19th century. The ideological concept of this semi-religious movement was built on one key principle: everything that exists in our world is God or a manifestation of His divine essence.
Human thought is a particle of this divine energy, which means that each individual can use thought as a tool to achieve his own good.
Wattles, who always had great social ambitions, learned a lot from the teachings of the New Thought and, after losing the 1908 elections for Congress, where he was nominated by the Socialist Party of the USA, he wrote the book The Science of Getting Rich. It was published in 1910, a year before his death, and shows the significant influence New Thought had on Wattles:
Thought is the only force capable of creating real material wealth from formless matter. The substance of which everything is made is matter that thinks, and the thought of form creates form in that matter.
And further:
The Universe wants you to have everything you want to have. Nature approves of your plans. Everything from birth is for you. Believe that it's true.
Here's what he thinks about development:
The goal of all life is development, and everything that lives has an inalienable right to all the development that it is capable of achieving. A person’s right to life means his right to freely and unrestrictedly enjoy everything that may be necessary for the fullest mental, spiritual and physical development; or, in other words, his right to be rich.
The book “The Science of Getting Rich” was such a colossal success that it made Wattles’ name famous throughout the country, and his work influenced many authors of self-development manuals in the future. Thus, the creator of the acclaimed book “The Secret,” Rhonda Byrne, has repeatedly said that Wattles’ text inspired her. In addition to her, Tony Robbins also praised the book.
When The Science of Getting Rich was republished in 2007, it instantly sold 75,000 copies across the United States, becoming a bestseller even 100 years later.
Habits
Habits are an invaluable fuel for laziness. They appear as a result of actions that are constantly repeated. Habits can be both good and bad. But, regardless of the level of their benefit, we bring them all to automaticity.
Where do they come from? When a person performs the same actions for a long time, he gets used to them, and they become an integral part of his life. Many people fall into a catastrophic dependence on their habits, but they are the ones that prevent us from moving forward.
That is, if we need change, we need to start doing something new that you haven’t done before. If you do not act, you will remain stuck at the zero reference point, not moving forward. Remember: changing habits entails global changes in fate.
From personal growth to capital growth
The books of another popular motivational author, Brian Tracy, also began to enjoy great success in the 1990s and 2000s. As his biography testifies, he was born into a poor family and did not even finish school - he dropped out to start working as a laborer on a ship that traveled around the world.
After a tour around the world, he got a job as a sales specialist in an American company and soon became its vice president. Along the way, Tracy analyzed his life path and the path of his colleagues, developing the principles of success, which formed the basis of many of his future books and seminars.
In 1981, he launched the training project The Phoenix Seminar, and in 1985 his cassettes entitled “The Psychology of Achievement” appeared on the market. The course thundered throughout the world, so it’s not surprising that Tracy decided to monetize his popularity: he wrote about 60 books, the most famous of which was the book “Get Out of Your Comfort Zone,” which sold 1,250,000 copies.
Finally, in the 1990s, another outstanding training guru, Tony Robbins, began to rise, about whom all of Russia learned in 2018. Prices for his tickets have reached impressive figures - up to 500,000 rubles for the opportunity to personally touch Tony - although fundamentally he is no different from his predecessors, except for his charisma. But he is much more aggressive: in one of his promotional videos, Robbins convincingly pronounces a phrase that claims to be the slogan of a “brave new world”: “Self-development - or death.” Sounds threatening.
It is interesting that in the “zero” and already today, fame came to books such as “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, where a person is no longer even required to leave that very comfort zone.
It is enough just to correctly formulate your request to the Universe. Having completed a circle in a hundred years, science, in order to achieve its own goals, returned to where it began - that is, to the works of Wallace Wattles.
To be fair, it is worth saying that training gurus are not only coming from the West. Guests from the East have also been teaching this since the 1960s and 1970s. The fashion for mysterious and thoughtful yogis these days has even reached Russia: for example, last year Sberbank was proud to invite the well-known Indian sage Sadhguru to their training. He likes to give advice that you can't argue with, like, "If you don't do the right things, the right things won't happen to you."
Ignorance
Another obstacle standing in your way is ignorance. Its essence is that a person does not perceive new information and condemns it in advance, without knowing any facts.
As a rule, people suffering from ignorance perceive change very painfully and do not want to notice anything new. They don’t trust anyone or anything, and the saddest thing about their situation is that they have driven themselves into a blind corner.
But they can still fix everything if they change their perception of the world around them. If you belong to this type of person, you must fully understand that everything around you is constantly changing and moving forward. You will either have to keep up with progress, or be stuck in the past for an indefinite period of time.
Change - both the world around you and your life will certainly change for the better!
Epilogue: we have been tired for so long
Not everyone is ready to rush into the pursuit of self-realization, and in general, not everyone wants to interfere in these disputes between coaches, training gurus and motivation specialists.
By the end of the second decade of the 21st century, people were tired: “being the best version of yourself,” of course, is great, but in the process of chasing this ideal you can turn your life into a living hell.
And this concerns not only direct self-realization: a rebellion against norms and stereotypes has begun on all fronts: the foundations of even the fashion industry are gradually crumbling, which, it would seem, was the last to lose its position, supported by injections of funds from the beauty industry. However, as one famous poet said, “nothing can be held back - not green on purple, not the V-neck of a T-shirt, not the broken edge of an umbrella,” and therefore today body positivity and the cult of “accepting yourself as you are” are triumphantly sweeping the planet.
Active supporters of “healthy egoism”, who call for not giving a damn about the opinions of others and their ideas of success, are gradually appearing all over the world, and their fame is growing rapidly. This time, there are “prophets” in our country: at the end of 2022, the book by psychologist Pavel Labkovsky with the telling title “I Want and I Will” sold 550,000 copies throughout the country - this is almost an unprecedented figure for the Russian market.
