Adam’s Peace

I’ve been thinking… Why does the field of Personal Development exist?

From what I can tell, there are three primary ways to approach personal development: Time management, task management, and emotional management.

It seems that the goal of the first two strategies is simply to get more done in less time… do more with less. While this is commendable in its own right, how does it fit in with the rest of our lives? If we take the first strategy, then we’ll have more time in the day, certainly. If we take the second strategy, then we’ll accomplish more during the day… By combining the two, we accomplish a lot in a very short time.

But, what is the point? Sure, we make a lot of widgets and trade those widgets for dollars. We then trade those dollars for someone else’s widgets… Eventually, though, we won’t be able to sell any more widgets or buy anyone else’s widgets, due to death and disease. Our life is impermanent, and while we may leave a great legacy, is there really a point to being the person who made the most widgets?

How about managing our emotions? Is there really a point to this?

The rewards from emotional management appear a lot sooner than the rewards from time and task management… yet emotions are even more temporary than the widgets we produce. I only know of two people who are known as the happiest people alive. Out of the billions of people in the world, this is an extremely small percentage. The chance of creating a legacy based on your emotions is astronomically low.

Now, I’m not saying that productivity and happiness are unimportant… Without food, shelter, and a stable emotional state, we would quickly die. I’m simply wondering why they are the primary focus of personal development.

There is one thing that I can think of, that is more permanent than emotions and that produces results faster than cranking out widgets: Knowledge.

There have been some studies among primates that suggest that humans are unique because we teach other members of our society. Other primates learn through observation just as well as humans, and there are some apes that make spears to use while hunting, which is a highly evolved skill. The difference is that we humans go out of our way to teach our young and our peers, rather than simply observing how others accomplish their tasks.

Some whales actively teach their young, such as by stranding them in shallow water, then demonstrating how to return to the deep water. Almost all mammals, especially carnivores, teach their young by demonstrating tasks essential to daily life, such as hunting or watching out for hunters. Primates and some rodents seem to be unique in being able to use tools, and a very small percentage of these species are able to create tools of their own. Among these tool using creatures, active education seems to be unique to humans.

When a person becomes a millionaire, they usually make their first million through hard work. They then make their second million by writing books, teaching others how to become millionaires.

Perhaps — just perhaps — what it means to be human boils down to learning, then teaching. It is often said that the best way to learn is to teach.

This is simply some food for thought.

On a related note, I have decided on a topic for one of my other sites, Code Artist. I’ll be using it to teach people how to develop software, starting with an extensive article on HTML that I expect to be finished with on March 24th.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:12 am and is filed under Consciousness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.