5 Disadvantages Of Not Taking Self-Development Seriously When Pursuing Success

It’s harder to cut down a tree with a blunt ax. So those who are most experienced at doing that sort of work, spend some time sharpening their axes before they begin. The inexperienced may not know how important this is and risk making their work cutting down a tree… that much harder.

The same can be said for pursuing goals or dreams. Unless you have experience realizing significant goals… it is most likely that you do not.

So what do you do?

The short and simple answer is to transform yourself into the type of person that does attain significant goals.

The process that makes this process is called self-development or sometimes referred to as personal development.

There are two main things that influence success in any individual’s life. Thoughts and actions. The right way of thinking and the right set of habits are sure to make you realize success.

The wrong ways of thinking and the wrong set of habits are sure to make you realize and even accept failure.

Rather than give you a list of why self-development is important for you, I think it may also be important to know what happens when you don’t take it seriously. I personally believe that more people are trying to cut down trees with blunt axes and are expecting positive results.

Here are 5 disadvantages of not taking self-development seriously:

1. Your thoughts and actions may be influenced by a limited understanding of topics

Many people think self-development is about positive motivation and subscribing to success quotes. But that isn’t the case at all. Self-development is a process of transforming yourself from who you are now… into the type of person that gets the things he/she desires to get in life without violating the rights of others.

How?

By changing the way that person thinks and acts. When you change how you think about a goal and how you work on achieving it, you consequently change the results you get. Not just by quantity or quality… but also by the time it takes to acquire it.

A person who has never baked a cake before can never expect to out-perform one who has been in that business for over 2 decades.

There are simply things this experienced person knows that make the process of baking cakes easier and produce higher quality.

In the world of software development, inexperienced developers tend to believe that building software is a hard process. And they often form ideas and understandings that are completely flawed about the process of becoming a good software developer… ESPECIALLY if they don’t even research ways they could become a good one.

Relying on your understanding and experience on any topic including software development cannot serve you well if you don’t have successful experience in it. You will save yourself a great deal of time and energy by learning from others (those who have succeeded) on how you can better yourself in any field.

2. You may not discover better and more efficient ways to attain your goals

Self-development is not a static process. It’s an ongoing one where you constantly are trying to evolve your thinking and way of doing things.

Those who have attained success know how important it is to keep working on improvement. Because success requires that you maintain it after you attain it.

This requires one to always ask the question, “How do I get better? How can I do this in a better way? How can I have better results in my life and from my efforts?”.

Leading that person to seek out ways to make his current reality that much better.

People who don’t ask this question… rarely change as individuals. If you don’t change… then nothing around you has reason to change as well. You will subscribe to the same way of life until you can no longer keep up with it or it begins to irritate you…

…maybe even forcing you to consider changing. Maybe even forcing you to ask yourself…”How do I get better? How can I do this in a better way? How can I have better results in my life and from my efforts?”

3. You may never discover your real strengths and weaknesses

I’m often shocked at dreamers and pursuers of success who refuse to take self-assessment tests if they are free and have been approved by reliable people (like the successful people they are trying to be like). To me, that’s no different from a person that plans a week-long trip around the country but doesn’t care what vehicle he/she uses and the condition of that vehicle.

There are people that pursue success by relying on their weaknesses instead of strengths. But they are unaware of this or are misinformed. Often stubborn and thinking that they will get better along the way.

That may be true… but it’s also inefficient. If you aren’t good at something, someone else is. Having that person help you achieve your goal will yield better results faster.

It can take people an entire lifetime of wasted effort to realize that they were doing things completely wrong, inefficiently, or both.

But you don’t have to pursue success in such a crude manner. Times have changed. We have access to the best knowledge on how to get ahead in any industry in any situation. To add to that, we have the best assessment tools to help us know what we are great at and should spend time developing …and what we are weak at and should delegate to others. We even have software tools that can do things we need done but have no expertise in.

4. You might develop a negative mind-set

Complaining is a habit I rarely notice among the successful people I admire and would like to be like. But it is a habit I see in people who want change but do not want to play their part in causing that change.

It’s easier to say that life is hard and that you can’t succeed because of your surroundings or situations. It’s easy to build a great case to support why you can’t do anything about it.

But it is hard to go to work changing your situation by yourself. Especially if you have a mindset that is blind to optimism.

I have noticed that successful people cannot afford to be pessimistic. It’s an investment in time and energy that could be better spent on doing something else that is constructive (no matter how small or insignificant it may seem at the time).

And the truth about life is that you get better at what you repeatedly do. If you spend your days' building cases for why you can’t do certain things… one day, you will be a great expert at not doing those things.

But if you spend your days being an agent of positive change… one day, nothing will be able to influence you to believe that you can’t make it in life.

To be honest, it’s hard to explain this to one with a mildest that believes in negativity or one who always challenges positivity or is pro-active.

What does one gain by making himself/herself strongly believe that they CAN’T change a situation they don’t like? I really cannot answer that question.

But what does one gain by making himself/herself strongly believe that they CAN change a situation they don’t like? Many things. Among the more important is the confidence to begin changing that situation in any small way possible.

5. Self-Development is the only known path to personal achievement

Human beings are hard to understand. We have a lot of research on how people think and behave, but there are still so many mysteries about us that are yet to be explained.

Among them is how THINKING works.

THINKING is what makes humans human. It’s what differentiates us from other living organisms. But not just because we think more.

You see… thinking can be a workshop.

One day a person looked at a bird… WONDERED what it would be like to fly… IMAGINED what it would look like to fly… and began to work on turning that THOUGHT INTO REALITY.

This is hard to understand let alone teach.

How can I make you understand that success must exist in the mind before it can exist in reality?

How can I make you understand that a strong belief in failure is the reason why a person can never succeed?

You simply cannot live a life that contradicts how you see yourself and how you see the world. How you CHOOSE to see yourself and how you CHOOSE to see the world.

If you want to succeed, you will have to think and act like one who succeeds. The only known way to do that… is to undergo positive change. And the quickest and most effective way to undergo such a change… is through self-development.

#makeProgressNotExcuses