Personal Development = Getting better at building the life you want to live.
That’s my definition of it and I’ve spent 15+ years pursuing different tools, ideas and routines.
And, trust me, there’s a lot of bullshit in this field.
Yet, it’s kinda obvious that personal development, especially by my definition, is a good thing.
But it can be incredibly frustrating navigating this chaotic field.
That’s why I’ve developed a meta framework of what personal development really is about. A perspective on it that just doesn’t suck.
Here are the 4 core pillars of personal development that carry all of your growth:
1. Calibration
Calibrate outside influences on your thoughts, emotions and decisions to be pushed around less by your environment.
This requires:
- Intellectual Understanding: understanding systems, incentives, culture, and psychology
- Visceral Awareness: becoming more emotionally aware of how your environment acts upon you
- Mental Resilience: becoming better at not blindly reacting to triggers around you
2. Self-Awareness
Understand more about your place in the world and what you truly want out of life.
This requires:
- Self Perception: understanding your character traits, your limits of knowledge, your strengths & weaknesses
- Intrinsic Motivators: understanding what drives you (needs & desires)
- Extrinsic Motivators: understanding what pulls you (formulates goals, assumed happiness proxies)
3. Navigation
Develop new ideas, set goals, make plans, and act on them effectively while cultivating an appreciation for where you’re at.
This requires:
- Cognitive Capacity: understanding logic, systems thinking, higher order consequences
- Belief Calibration: understanding, testing and iterating your beliefs about what’s right, wrong and possible
- Mental Models: reductions of the world’s complexity down to useful heuristics
4. Cultivation
Nourishing the process of learning, developing your abilities and creating opportunities.
This requires:
- Habits: useful regular actions re. 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
