Rethinking Personal Development and Self-Help

If you’re an entrepreneur of any flavor then you know personal development or self-help work is something you hear about constantly. There is a success doctrine soup that has ingredients like…

Read books by folks like Robbins, Rohn, Ziglar, Brown, Cardone, every day.

Listen to audio by all those same folks, every day.

Because as the doctrine goes, this continued washing of your brain with better ideas will ultimately help you succeed more and faster.

This personal development focus is essentially the defacto religion of entrepreneurship. The reading and the audio the sacraments, the conferences and seminars, the church.

And there’s a reason for that… it works. Sort of.

There is absolutely no question that spending some time every day reading and listening to encouraging, uplifting, motivating, and challenging material is good for you.

Rare is a day that goes by that I don’t participate in both the reading and audio sacraments. I’ve been doing so as a personal practice for nearly a decade.

Do it long enough and you can clearly see the benefits but you notice some other things, not the least of which is that the answers you’re seeking and want so desperately aren’t out there… in another book, audio, Podcast, program…

… the answer is you.

All the advice, goose bump inspiring stories, tactics eventually all run together into some pretty simple concepts, the biggest being YOU and only YOU can change your situation.

But this is where the more sinister side of the endless diet of personal development comes in. You can easily get caught in the endless loop of you’re one breakthrough, book, or guru away from finally being fixed and then you can succeed.

It doesn’t work that way.

The answer isn’t in the pursuit of more quotes, books, and gurus. The answer is you and I finally waking up and doing what we inherently know we should do. Realizing once and for all that the success we seek isn’t in the next book telling us about what to do or how to think, it’s in us stepping up and doing the work.

I’m afraid many of us hide in our journals, whiteboards, books, and deep thoughts not because we’re interested in doing the deep work but because it’s a safe place to hide.

Our fellow tribe members understand because hey, this stuff is the religion. We can be encouraged and even supported to hide.

But the needle doesn’t move.

We don’t get the results we want.

We’re on the treadmill, running fast to another book, audio, or guru but we’re going nowhere.

Am I suggesting you ditch all your books? Delete all your podcasts and audiobooks?

Of course not.

I’m suggesting that those things should be used as tools not crutches. They should be pitstops not destinations.

Because not a single one of those books or audio’s can do what you can if you would finally stop hiding in them.

The answer isn’t out there… the answer is you.