I don’t think personal development is an exercise in trying to reach some idealized state. Or at least, not some kind of universal idealized state that’s the same for everyone. I’m not interested in personal development because I’m trying to become more like somebody else who I think is admirable in some way. I’m interested in personal development because I’m trying to better understand and learn about myself. I believe that most of us only have visibility to a small sliver of our own personalities, capabilities, and general self-knowledge. Who “I am” is a bit of a black box, I think. I see the parts that are brought out of the shadows by the demands of my normal day-to-day life and the challenges I experience navigating it. But I get the sense that this is only a small portion — that there are parts of me that exist but I don’t regularly see or experience because they aren’t generally needed to navigate my normal life. I want to find those hidden parts. I want to understand those under utilized parts. And that’s why I pursue personal development. I want to see and understand and interact with the parts of me that are below the surface.
Or let’s try another metaphor on for size: an unmapped territory. The visible parts of me and my personality are like an extremely well-mapped neighborhood. There’s a ton of details on the map and it’s extremely precise. But as you get further from the center it starts to get a bit fuzzier. There aren’t as many road names and the features are more vague until eventually, once you get far enough away from that extremely well-mapped center, it simply shows fog and here be dragons. Personal development as I conceptualize it, then, is the systematic series of forays into that fog to update and add detail to the map that is me. It’s looking at that fuzzy map and the warning of dragons and asking, “Do there actually be dragons? Let’s see if we can find them.”
This is deliberately in contrast to a deficit view of personal development where I’m constantly trying to become better because I’m not enough. Or, because I’m not close enough to some sort of ideal person (or writer or athlete or consultant or whatever aspect of my identity isn’t feeling up to snuff at the moment). Approaching personal development from this angle is a qualitatively different, and I would argue less pleasant, experience. I’m certainly not immune from falling into this kind of comparative mindset. It’s easy to look at someone and immediately use them as some kind of measuring stick that almost always seems to find you wanting. That’s not a fun way to go through life and if you look at personal development through that lens I wouldn’t be surprised if it wouldn’t be attractive to you.
Limit work in progress in all the things — including your good intentions about yourself
But, let’s say that for whatever reason you’re already of the mind that personal development is an inherently rewarding experience and that being on a quest to better understand yourself is attractive to you. In my experience, one of the most difficult things about thinking this way is being overwhelmed by the options in front of you at any one time. And if your reading diet has as many non-fiction books in it as mine does you are constantly finding good ideas for things you’d potentially like to try. If you’re like most people, those ideas end up floating around in your head in some kind of liminal state for awhile until you eventually forget about them and go back to whatever your current default behaviors are. If your lucky, you might try something different long enough to slightly adjust your default behavior. If your like me, however, you’ll spend most of the time feeling like your failing at enacting new behaviors because you have too many in your head at once and no real clear commitments about what you told yourself you would do.
Luckily, there’s a thought technology that comes from our understanding of how work flows through a system that I think is useful in this context, too: limiting work in progress. Somewhat counterintuitively, the most work in progress that exists in a system the less smoothly it flows through that system. By limiting yourself to less pieces of work in progress (with everything that still remains to be done waiting to be pulled from a backlog) you’re able to do much more than if you tried to do everything at once. This applies to personal development intentions, too. Trying to do everything at once is a recipe for frustration and for not actually changing much of anything.
A great tool for visualizing and limiting work in progress is a Kanban board. A kanban board is a simple tool for showing a list of work items sitting in a backlog, a list of work items currently being worked, and a list of work items that have been completed. These “work items” move from left to right through the system such that anybody can walk up to the board (or load it on their computer) and see the state of the system. They can see the work that’s yet left to be done, the work that’s currently happening, and everything that has already been accomplished. Why don’t we use this same idea for personal development endeavors, too?
What if instead of getting inspired by something you read in a book or article and immediately try to implement in your life (likely on top of whatever inspired you last week or the week before) you captured the idea and put it on a backlog? Then, on a regular cadence you could consult your backlog of ideas and promote a reasonable number to “active” status. As part of promoting something from the backlog you’ll also do some thinking up front to understand what it is you’re actually trying to do. Like a good scientist, you’ll have a hypothesis about what will happen and you’ll have a sense of what metrics you’ll need to look at to validate or invalidate your hypothesis. At the very least, you’ll know that on a certain date you will look at an experiment you were running and ask yourself a few questions like, “How did it go?,” “Did I learn anything about myself?,” “Does this tell me anything about what I should do next?”
That’s what I’m trying to create. An approach to help you capture, process, and implement personal development intentions so that you can come to better understand yourself over time. A system to help you keep from being overwhelmed with all the ideas you have about things you want to try or ways you think you could be “better” (however you want to define that word). By bringing some structure to this whole process I can spend more time and energy actually trying new things rather than trying to hold it all in my head. Holding it all in my head means I inevitably forget good ideas and almost guarantees that I feel badly about myself as I try to do a bunch of half-formed ideas/intentions at the same time — seeing very few of them to completion and generally feeling like I’m not doing “enough.”
Don’t (just) build habits, uncover insights about yourself
Over time, as I do more and more experiments/experiences I’ll occasionally shake loose an insight that helps me better understand myself. While these insights feel blindingly obvious when they occur to me, they’re also the type of thing that are likely to be forgotten faster than I would like. That’s why I want to capture them and keep them somewhere where I can regularly review them. This body of insights about myself and the world is my best articulation of who I am and a visual representation of my growing self-knowledge. It’s the map that I want to be adding more and more details to as I do more forays into the unknown.
The whole point of caring about personal development and doing experiments is to knock loose, uncover, craft, or otherwise get my arms around these key insights about how my brain works, what my personality is, why I think or believe the way I do, etc. These insights, then, can shine a powerful light on interesting paths to pursue in my personal development efforts. Which then creates new insights (or tweaks previous ones). The cycle continues. And because there’s no specific end point that I’m shooting for, no idealized state of perfection, I’m glad the cycle continues. The cycle itself is full of meaning and excitement.
Is finding joy in this cycle something that’s completely unique to me? Is it only interesting to a very small number of people who are similar to me? Or is it something that can be taught to anyone who has a little bit of curiosity about themselves and how they interact with the world? I honestly don’t know but this is the path of inquiry that I’m going to explore until I figure it out.