World Musings

One movie I recommend to everyone that is involved with their own personal development to see is the “The Peaceful Warrior”. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil anything, but toward the end of the movie when the warrior goes back to find his master to introduce his friends to him, he is gone. His mentor has disappeared. At first, this part of the movie didn’t register to me as anything significant. But then I realized that what it meant was that each us wishes that we could have had a mentor that the character of the movie had, but what this particular scene was trying to show was that we don’t need a mentor. We don’t need someone to mentor us because when it comes to personal development, life is your mentor.

There is so much that life and experience can teach each of us. There are lessons to learn every day. But you have to be paying attention and living in the “here and now” to learn them. There are some people in this world that have made good decisions and have gotten ahead in life simply because their parents gave them the right advice at the right time, and they implemented it. Not all of us have this advantage. Some of us might not have parents that could give us the great advice that could have made all the difference in our lives. For example, there are things that I have learned through my own experience, such as home buying, that if I had been given the advice that I know now by a parent or mentor, my current situation would be just that much better. I had to learn from my own mistakes along the way in life, and now hopefully I will be able to pass my knowledge along to someone else someday. However, advice from an elder might be able to help improve external situations, but when it comes to internal situations such as your happiness, the best advice will come from life and the motivation you have to embark on a personal journey.

So the advantage of having a good mentor, or teacher, would simply be to get good advice about things early on which in turn can save us some headaches when it comes to certain situations such as home buying, car shopping, choosing a career, etc.. However, when it comes to your own development and improving yourself in the realm of skills and performance, that has to come from you. Only you can make you better. You are responsible for your own self improvement.

I believe the key ingredients for your development are ambition, emotional IQ (patience), and concentration. Ambition is the never ending thirst and motivation to get your hands on anything that can help you learn to do better whatever it is that you are involved in, such as a project or an assignment at work. Emotional IQ is all about having patience and never giving up. In other words, die trying. Concentration gives you focus. And focusing is what keeps you in the “here and now”. You exist in the here and now, not in the past, and not in the future, but now. You are responsible for yourself and the good thing about that is there is no true satisfaction in life relying on someone else to make you. Because if you are always relying on someone else to make you, then they can break you as well. The most truly satisfying way of making it anywhere is on your own. The journey is what brings us happiness, and it’s the journey of your own personal development that is better taken alone.