#2028 Growing, Growing, Gone
Sometimes it seems to me that much of the population is slogging through a morass of "good enough."
Good enough seldom is, and when it comes to personal development, it never is. Being the PD junkie I am, I know full well how judgmental I am, and I'm ok with that because if you're reading this, we are singing from the same hymnal anyway.
I was speaking with a good friend about our formative years. It's interesting because so many people I talk to in their forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies still carry many habits and opinions given to them before they were twenty. Hence, we call those years before our twenties "the formative years."
DUH - that is when we were formed.
Unfortunately, once we have passed our formative years, we aren't as malleable. It didn't take much influence to get us to adopt concepts and beliefs as we grew. We absorbed, like osmosis, many of the beliefs espoused by the culture of the tribe and place we grew up in.
Those osmotic beliefs, hardened like forged steel and now, like steel, take a lot of applied heat to soften and reshape.
Think, for example, about bigotry and prejudice and the many, many years and Herculean efforts of the civil rights movement to try to reshape those thoughts.
It's the same with us. We come into adulthood with beliefs, mostly formed in our youth, that we need to challenge. Most of us understand that, and in our twenties and thirties, we rebel and uncover truths obscured by our upbringing.
But what about beyond that? Personal development means continuing to challenge our beliefs and making it a practice to improve.
It's like the path to enlightenment in Eastern religion. PD is the unceasing examination of our thoughts, beliefs, and actions with the intention to get better.
It isn't necessarily critical of where we are, but instead it is the recognition that we aren't stagnant and the ideal of where we might go.
Discounting for mental illness, if not for outside stresses, could one's responses be more understanding, or are we listening with built-in translators coloring words and events with the pejorative definitions of our past?
Spending time with my beliefs and judgments helps me see whether they still serve me. Is the store clerk a lazy ________. (Pick the label that you think applies to them.) Or were they just diagnosed with cancer, battling an eviction, denied healthcare treatment, or ruminating about a lost love? We have no idea, so why not choose a label of kindness and understanding? This is a big part of personal development; developing the character that can see and translate events differently.
Living in a world of personal development doesn't mean living with a constantly critical inner voice. In my earlier years, that inner drill sergeant kicked my ass regularly. I came to PD from a place of never feeling like I was enough and always on the high side of a two-sided scale when I weighed myself against others I admired. I suffered imposter syndrome and admonished myself for every perceived misstep.
As I got older, I understood that improvement doesn't need to come from a place of extreme dissatisfaction. Instead, I learned to be happy with where I am and what I have while striving to be better and have more. It's like Judge or Ohtani winning the MVP. There's no doubt they are happy with their 2025 season performances, and no doubt they busted their butts training in the off-season, striving for even better 2026 stats.
Many months ago, I quoted Tiny Zehnder, a restaurateur whose fine establishment I have visited several times. Tiny, a foodie, said, "It is better to be green and growing as opposed to ripe and rotting". Ripe and rotting is the belief that we're done – that there isn't anything left to learn or changes we're capable of undertaking.
Personal development is nonnegotiable for me. It is a way of life that I hope to continue until, keeping Tiny's quote in mind, I am part of the compost.
Own your sales gene…