Life is beautiful, but enigmatic. It does not follow a rational path from point A to point B. Life does not come with a textbook with all the right answers provided in a guide at the end. And yet, most of our educational system is based on this. Up until adulthood, every child is subject to competitive cramming of facts. Every individual is tamed & taught to grow into a slave. No educational institution is focussed on self knowledge or self awareness. Even though, you are your most important subject.

Any coach, no matter how skilled, cannot teach you how to understand or handle life. Neither can he or she teach you about yourself. You can only learn about life and yourself through your experiences. And life should be experienced with full vigour, without inhibition.

As per my experience, the following are the main experiences for one needs to indulge in - for personal development. In each of these sections, I’ll outline what I have learnt though these experiences. You cannot learn the same by reading this book. You need to choose your own experiences in these respective categories in order to develop your own learning.

• If you want to learn about people, society & culture, travel the world
• If you want to learn about applied sciences, start a business
• If you want to learn ethics, play a sport
• If you want to learn to love, pursue an art
• If you want to learn devotion, adopt a dog

The different approaches to self improvement

The personality Paradigm

This approach basically guides you towards creating a great personality in order to achieve your goals. However, the two main shortcomings of this approach are the facts that your personality is highly dependent on your genetics. And secondly your personality creates a higher focus on the outside rather than the inside.

The character paradigm

The character Paradigm was an improvement over the personality approach, because it focused more on development of the character rather than the personality. However the flaw that I have noticed in this approach is that a big part of the person’s character is determined by their upbringing.
The formation of your personality & your character is very highly influenced by nature & nurture respectively. During adulthood, when you are actually in a position to take control of your actions a large part of your personality & character are already defined. You can only put on minor refinements to these two attributes.

The Choices paradigm – Actions and people

In order to come up with a more effective approach to self improvement, I had to shift my focus away from the previously established methods & start with a clean slate.
There is only one resource that you have in life, and that this time. And there are only two kinds of choices that you get to make with respect to your time – what actions are you going to choose to do or not do, and who are you going to do it with.
That is, you only get to choose your actions, and the people you get involved. There are no other choices provided to you in your life. And therefore you should only focus on these two choices.
The personality paradigm focuses on image management. The character paradigm is built on decisions. However, we are not an image, & life is not a collection of decisions. Life is a sequence of choices. At any given time, we have the choices to stick with or to change our decisions.