Personal Development, Taking it Personal

Personal Development is a broad topic, but comes together under one underlying principle: Are you working to improve yourself in some way.

The past few years I have been really focusing on trying to find ways to purse personal development as an over all life quest. I want to be constantly becoming more. More healthy, more wealthy, more wise.

I've made some pretty remarkable changes in my life in the past year or so and it has defiantly impacted what I would think of as my "Progress" in personal development. Looking at myself and my core values now, I am further along the path, incrementally in all areas, but none of them have seen what I would call a marked improvement, baring perhaps programing. I now feel comfortable attempting to write small programs in either Ruby or PHP and that is a pretty drastic change from a year or so ago.

Sitting down and thinking through the past year or so, I think i've started to realize that it's not that I need to be trying to do more with myself, but I need to be stripping away to what is really necessary, what really matters. The thing about that is that it does mean giving up some things. Some things I really enjoy. It's a hard thing to try to figure out what of the things you are doing you really "need" or are really making the impact on your life that you need them to, as Antoine de Saint Exupery said "Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away."

So right now I focus on taking things away. Trying it out. Do I need to play video games with my friends? Surprising answer, yes. I need that time to be social at least a few times a week and right now being on the road it's the only way I'm staying connected to my "community". So having tried taking that out for a few months, I find that I'm happier and more productive with it. However cutting out access to 90% of the web durring the week so I can focus more, total life improvement  Using apps like Self Control and Concentrate is enabling me to get more done in the day and have time at night for my partner and to recharge the creative muscles, or work on some side projects instead of feeling constantly under the gun.

So the next month or so I'm going to be trying to cut away to what really matters in my health decisions. I think that health is the foundation from which all other progress can be built so I want to really dial that in and then spend the rest of my 31st year building on a solid foundation. I'm working on an exercise schedule and trying to find ways to make having a healthy diet both enjoyable enough and easy enough that I'll actually make it happen. I'm getting close, but I still feel like there are things to change, so we'll see. Progress reports to come.