There's a conundrum in personal development that can be tricky to reconcile, and it's this:
Different things work for different people.
If you want to get fit, there's a thousand books teaching you a thousand different things, and they'll likely all work to some degree.
If you want to learn how to write, 10 different writers will give you 10 different bits of conflicting advice. And they're all correct.
If you want to learn how to be an executive leader, each leader you study will lead in completely different ways from the rest. And yet they're all great leaders in their own right.
And this is the reality of personal development. You can read and learn all that your heart desires. (My heart desires a lot of knowledge, so I'm not knocking it.) But true personal development comes in the filtering and application of what you learn.
We have to be able to filter the information that we know won't work for us, and we have to apply the things we believe will.
Filter, apply. Filter, apply.
The more that this becomes a practice, the better our filtering and application abilities become. I read every single night, and I likely will until my last breath. It's not because I feel like I need more knowledge.
It's because I have fallen in love with the practice of applying what's useful, and discarding the rest.
Comments
No posts