Personal development or intellectual entertainment?

It can be hard to admit this, but my interest in personal development for the past 20+ years hasn’t been in personal development, but THINKING about personal development!

I enjoy navigating concepts more than I do in implementing advice. This is a common bias, especially in intellectual/analytical types. We want to compare the merits of different tools more than we want to use a single tool proficiently. Even when we settle on the best tool in its category, we move on to another category in personal development to obsess over.

This realization can be disheartening, but it’s also liberating: knowing that you enjoy the intellectual exploration of personal development isn’t a bad thing. But you want to develop on top of it the added love for engaging with reality and refining your thinking with real-life experience.

Living inside our heads might be comforting, but that’s not where life is to be lived.