Personal Development = Getting better at building the life you want to live.
That’s my definition.
I’ve spent 15+ years chasing different ideas, tools, routines.
And trust me, there’s a lot of bullshit out there.
But it's obvious—personal development, especially by above definition, is essential.
Problem is, navigating this chaotic field can be frustrating as hell.
So I've developed a meta-framework of what personal development is really about.
A perspective that doesn't suck.
Here are the that drive all your growth:
1. Calibration
Calibrate outside influences on your thoughts, emotions, and decisions to be pushed around less by your environment.
- Intellectual Understanding: Grasping systems, incentives, culture, and psychology.
- Visceral Awareness: Becoming more emotionally aware of how your environment acts upon you.
- Mental Resilience: Getting better at not blindly reacting to triggers around you.
2. Self-Awareness
Understand your place in the world and what you truly want out of life.
- Self-perception: Knowing your character traits, knowledge limits, strengths, and weaknesses.
- Intrinsic Motivators: Understanding what drives you (needs & desires).
- Extrinsic Motivators: Knowing what pulls you (goals, assumed happiness proxies).
3. Navigation
Develop new ideas, set goals, make plans, and act on them effectively while appreciating where you are now.
- Cognitive Capacity: Understanding logic, systems thinking, higher-order consequences.
- Belief Calibration: Testing and iterating your beliefs about what's right, wrong, and possible.
- Mental Models: Reducing the world's complexity down to useful heuristics.
4. Cultivation
Nourish the process of learning, develop your abilities, and create opportunities.
- Habits: Useful regular actions for health, productivity, creativity, and learning.
- Social Interaction: People skills and relationship building.
- Mind Wellness: Cultivating a healthy inner mental and emotional landscape.
I’ll leave you with those.
Cheers,
Phil
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P.S.: Personal development is a result of the right inputs.
Better ideas. Better insights. Better resources.
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