Why Does Personal Development Fail
No amount of sugarcoating will cover up the fact that personal development is hard —too damn hard, that people will almost always give up after they take the first step.
Let me get this straight — you are here because there is something you want to fix or improve in yourself, and most probably, you have consulted a thousand self-help books that you can fill up a small town library with everything you’ve read. In fact, you have started to take it quite seriously — you wake up early, dive into a cold shower, hit the gym, and do it all over again; perhaps, with an extra rep or set every week. You have been at it, that you could have developed quite the addiction to the smell of the gym every single day.
Then, it all comes crashing down.
Due to several circumstances, you have stopped doing everything, and even gained back the weight you have worked so hard to lose — and you have readied your excuse of “bulking” whenever someone tells you that you’ve gotten quite huge recently. Also, you have been munching on chips while reading this article, possibly readying a comeback towards me, or even creating a mass movement to cancel and urge a boycott or, better, launch a multi-national campaign against the writer of this column.
Fret not, though, I have been there, and, maybe, still slipping there from time to time. Else, I would not be able to write something oh-so-highly relatable to you and to everyone else in the same state of mind.
We’ve all been here — we started something. We are working on it really, really well; and then, boom, we just stop. Be it training, writing, or even knitting — we all have that aspect of us that we want to improve, and we want to improve for some reason.
Well, I ain’t gonna tell you how to fix something that only you can fix. No amount of sugarcoating will cover up the fact that personal development is hard — too damn hard, that people will almost always give up after they take the first step — and yes, telling yourself that this is too damn hard just reinforces that fact in your mind. That’s the first step in letting the little things get into your mind — and eventually, you’ll stop improving actively, and you will see the decline in the habits you had formed. This time, you tell yourself that you will get it right this time — but then, it is too damn hard, right? Thus, you will quit again, and see your own fall, and to no one’s surprise, you have created your own cycle. Familiar?
What I can tell you is this — only you can break this cycle. Get up, defeat the enemy you have created — or, just do not create it, in the first place. Wake up, hit the gym, write, and remind yourself why you had been doing this. Only then will your brain realize that it ain’t a monkey brain, but something else — perhaps it will realize something that makes us human, something that separates us from primates and other animals acting on pure instinct.
Perhaps, by then, you will realize that you have taken one step more than everyone that had not started yet. One step is an advantage, and two steps are an unfair advantage.
And you — yes, you — have already taken your first step.
