Distilling the Art and Science of Personal Growth Down to Its Elements
The journey has many names: personal growth, self-improvement, self-help. But everyone is familiar with it. It’s a journey that so many of us begin, but that–if you do it right–it really doesn’t end. It’s been written about so often that one hesitates to add one more volume to the already towering stack of books about it. And yet, I did just that.
I began writing about productivity and self-improvement in 2014. For about 4 years, my own journey on the path of personal development was informed by and expressed through that writing. But it wasn’t until one session of year-end reflection that–at the behest of my always practical wife, Erin–I entertained putting together a book about that journey. As I began to comb through the 4 years of writing I had done, I began to see that every piece I wrote dealt with one or more of three things:
- being: your way of confronting the world, yourself, and others in it
- thinking: your way of conceiving of reality–both how it is, and how you’d like it to be
- doing: taking action, and creating change
This book is separated into 3 sections–one for each of the categories above. Each section is a collection of essays centered around those topics. Each short essay can be read on its own as part of a morning motivational routine, or as part of a progressively deeper journey into self-improvement.
Topics covered include:
- building a compassionate relationship with yourself
- ditching work-life “balance” for something better
- choosing values over goals
- getting others interested in you, and invested in your success
- using methods to think deeply and differently
- harnessing the power of journaling by leveraging different methods
- becoming truly and robustly open-minded