Building On The Top Of yourself
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how hard actually is the journey to develop on the top of your current self, on the top of what you are and know today. Let me begin with a few practical examples:
- It is more difficult to bring your background when contributing to decisions in a new project than to learn and follow the project or company’s guidelines.
- It’s not too hard to enroll to short courses and finish them, in the end you have a new piece of knowledge. However it is generally more challenging to incorporate the new knowledge and make it useful in your daily life.
- It is harder to disagree in social occasions than to act in order to seek harmony and keep social cohesion.
When I say harder or challenging here I mean “it takes more intentional energy” , and what these situations have in common is that we end up unconsciously choosing the easier path because it takes less energy. The experiences you get in the easier path does not necessarily increments to your current state, but it builds on the side of your current self.
You have a wider knowledge from the guidelines in your new project, from the course you finished and you may get to know a different point of view in a social occasion. You can always go back to these experiences and memories and use them here and there.
On the other hand, when choosing the harder path you are actually considering and changing your current state, behavior, opinion. Disagreeing in a social occasion will require you to evaluate your opinion, the other opinion,+ identify differences and reason about them. You might even end up forming a different opinion by incorporating the new point of view. That is a process of building on the top of yourself, it requires a lot more intention and energy.
The process of considering and eventually changing your current state is to me real growth. It is definitely not possible to build upon ourselves in every aspect and situations, but we can choose which ones deserve our focus and energy.
Whatever growth means to you, I hope these concepts helped you understand your growth and better manage it. To finish this article I’ll leave you with a few points I consider helpful to achieve real growth in any area you want:
- Acknowledge and fully accept yourself as you are today. This step alone can take a long time to achieve, but it’s definitely part of anyone’s real growth journey.
- Be present, actively participate in moments, conversations, discussions. Contribute by writing, talking, connecting to people. Have content to share.
- Learn and evolve by changing your current knowledge rather than adding a piece of knowledge into your experience.
