Using Personal Growth to Follow Your Dreams

How far can a bit of deliberate self-development carry you? The shift tends to start the moment you let go of the victim mentality, that habit of feeling the world happens to you. Once it loosens its grip, something clicks: you really can go after almost anything you decide matters. What follows is a look at how a working grasp of psychology helps you push your own life forward and take some control of where it's headed, instead of waiting on the bench for life to wave you in.

Growing as a person means getting clear on who you are and what you actually want. One of the first things you notice is that your goals sharpen. Maybe you had none to speak of before; they tend to form anyway as the work of developing yourself goes on. Nearly everyone sets out with huge ambitions. Then reality lands a solid hit, and plenty of people get overwhelmed and quietly settle for the ordinary. Taking the easy road is just how we're wired.

Settling carries a cost, though. When your heart isn't in the work, the work gets heavier and more stressful than it needs to be. Proverbs puts it as guarding your heart, because it is the wellspring of life. And stress sits behind most illness. A job is demanding enough on its own, so if your heart has checked out, so have you, and the whole thing turns into a weight you drag around.

The more you commit to developing yourself, the clearer those goals get. Life gets simpler in a way, because you stop scattering your attention and start putting what you truly want ahead of everything else. There's an odd twist in it: as you grow, your day-to-day gets simpler while your vision gets bigger. You begin to accept that the big things are genuinely within reach.

Showbiz is full of these rags-to-riches runs. Take Matt Groening, who created The Simpsons. The show has run on Fox since it launched in 1990. If his name doesn't ring a bell, don't worry about it; basically no one knew who he was until the cartoon about Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa showed up on TV. Before he landed the executive producer title, Groening worked rough labor jobs like most of us do. Jobs like that aren't bad in themselves, but set them next to running a television empire. His net worth today sits around half a billion dollars. That is not a typo.

Steven Spielberg is another one who made it big. His story wasn't exactly rags to anything, but money was never the engine for him. He once said he never cared about it, that it was just a side effect of doing what he loved. That's a real marker of personal growth: you order your priorities so you chase the thing you love, then get so absorbed in it that a fortune catches up with you almost by accident. Spielberg is now worth something in the neighborhood of $350 million.

The best thing about personal growth is that it belongs to you. As you develop, you get to decide what to do with the strength you've built. You can keep things small and pay attention to the little stuff, aware that by global standards, at least if you're in the United States, you already count as wealthy. Or you can turn your abilities toward other people. Go that second route and you tend to build a reputation and a career almost without meaning to. One day you look up and the income, or the net worth, is simply there.

You could be the one who starts the business, or writes the next hit drama or sitcom, or these days another reality show. It often takes a single person with the right connections in Hollywood, or anywhere, willing to back your idea.

The strange part about self-development, and about psychology in general, is this: the more you grasp that nothing outside you is required to make you happy, the more opportunity you start to see everywhere. You're in a position to work with those opportunities rather than be run by them, and you're no longer going into debt trying to buy your way into feeling okay.

E Bishop Wooten, The Liberal Conservative Blog.