Personal Development could be another phrase for life-long-learning - you should never stop learning and always try out new things.
Here is the fact I liked most in my following text:
"Consider, if you are reading just 4 books to specific subject, you know more about this subject than 99% of the world population."
Here are some of the main points, that are being covered in this blogpost:
1. Sports
2. Reading
3. Meditate - evaluate
4. Follow your passion
5. Schedule your activities and days
Why is Sports important?
This sounds a little bit basic, but always when you are training you are doing something good for your body (and mind) and you are gathering the energy that you need to get the best out of yourself.
In conclusion sports, especially in the youth is important to improve physical and mental health (compare: (1) Why is Sports important to children). You will also suffer less likely from illnesses like high blood pressure, diabetes or even cancer.
Skills like reading, mental abbilities, IQ and memoryzationi are being improved.Why is reading important?
You can also read some novels, but your main focus should be on books that will help you with your personal development, finance marketing or rhetoric and of course some books about the section that you are working in and interested in, e.g. as a hobby. General knowledge will also help you with progressing as a person and in your job.
What do you think, if your boss has the opportunity to decide which of two people he will hire, will he choose the one who just knows the things he got taught from school and university, or will he hire the person that has not just the same knowledge, but also has some other abilities, so he is able to transfer knowledge to work, who is grown as a person and determined. I think most people would choose person number two. Consider, if you are reading just 4 books to specific subject, you know more about this subject than 99% of the world population.
If you compare reading to watching tv, studies show, that tv is even declining the intelligence of people(compare: (2) Books vs TV how they stack up against one another)Meditate / Evaluate
With meditating you can learn how to focus on things and how your mind is able to defeat your body. With meditating you will learn what are positive influences to your life and what are bad influences to avoid.
With avoiding bad influences you will be a much more happier person and so you will gain more mental energy (compare: (3) Meditate to create).
I think just 5 minutes a day meditating are worth it.
In this mediation you can also evaluate your appointments and tasks, what was bad and what was, even if your planning was well done, so you will always improve your methods. See point 5 for more information of scheduling your day.Follow your Passion!
This is one of the most important points, not for fun many people tell you, that if you want to learn something new, build yourself a case in something you like, so you will be really interested in solving and will memorize a lot more of the important strucutre, this is also a strong point for life-long-learning. The first three mentioned points are leading to this point here, they are they key. Sports is providing the energy, reading is improving your skills in your passion and mediating is giving you a positive drive and freedom in mind.
Link: mattmorris.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Personal-Development-2.jpgSchedule your activities
Start scheduling your activities. This will first seem like a time waste, but while doing this permanently you will realize how good this is. First find out, if you like to write down your appointments and tasks in an app or on your smartphone/outlook or in a paper calendary, both works, but everyone has to find out which is better. I myself prefer paper calendars, due to the things, that they are not always reminding me of appointments and creating pressure with this. try out some methods for finding out which of your activities are important. Fore example there is the Eisenhower method (compare: (4) The Eisenhower method for taking action). The Eisenhower method is having two matrizes, urgent and important taks. So this concludes in 4 types of tasks:
a. Priority 1 tasks are both urgent and important.
b. Priority 2 tasks are important but not urgent.
c. Priority 3 tasks are urgent but not important.
d. Priority 4 tasks are neither urgent nor important
By priorizing your tasks you will have much more energy for the important ones and will loose less time. Ever felt like there was way to much pressure on you, cause you were wasting time with unimportant things, e.g. Social Media, but were ignoring the important things in your life. This will lead you to a helix of negativite and aimlessness, that can destroy you. At some point, there is so much waiting to be done by you, that you don't even know where to start. So start scheduling and priorizing right now.
Link: jamesclear.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/eisenhower-box.jpg?x32321
Conclusion:
Start now, don't wait. Set and focus on your priorities.
A good short video and possible a well known thing is the Jar of live:
PS: I am still working on my paper about cryptocurrencies, right now it's about 20 pages and it's still growing :)
Sources:
Why is Sports important to children, written by:
link: http://www.rcga.org/uploads/documents/L2P/EN/pg_016-017_Why%20is%20sport%20important%20for%20children.pdfBooks vs TV how they stack up against one another, written by: Melissa Chu
link: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-chu/books-vs-tv-how-they-stac_b_10928340.htmlMeditate to CreatE, written by: Lorenza S. Colzato*, Ayca Ozturk and Bernhard Hommel
link: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116/fullThe Eisenhower Method for taking action, written by Thomas Oppong
link: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-eisenhower-method-for-taking-action-how-to-distinguish-between-urgent-and-important-tasks-895339a13dea