People invest a lot on businesses. They shell out money for different investments that promise to reap rewards twice, thrice or more of the initial contribution put in.
But when it comes to yourself, Scrooge seems to take over.
Somehow, that’s understandable. After all, you see a lot of resources online that seem to offer things for free. So why spend? What’s the added value in shelling out money for something that you can actually get for free?
The Importance of Personal Development
Before we answer that question, let’s take a look at why you have to spend time, effort and money to develop yourself.
Personal development makes you understand who you are.
Remember that one of the reasons why we do what we do is because of our natural urges. Our natural wants. Our natural needs. Our natural desires. Without a clear understanding of this, you have less power over the unnecessary wants, which could greatly affect your discipline and your use of resources.
The more you understand yourself, the more you understand WHY you want and need these things, and the more you can learn how to control them.
Personal development helps you find your true purpose in life.
Life is more than just waking up in the morning and going to work. Sure, you earn enough (sometimes even more than enough) to feed you and your family and to pay for the rest of your wants and needs. But how do you feel at the end of each day? Do you sleep peacefully knowing that you have contributed to the greater good, or do you toss and turn in bed, wondering when you’re going to start feeling fulfilled?
Through personal development, you find out what your natural gifts are and you have a clearer vision of what you should really be doing.
Personal development helps you save time.
A lot of people grow old, wondering what they did with the decades that they were given. Sadly, some leave this world not even getting near the life goals that they have set for themselves.
When you start putting in an effort to develop yourself, you can understand which path to take towards your goals. Through a deeper understanding of oneself, you can go straight to the finish line. Yes, this path may not be the easiest. But it sure beats taking shortcuts that lead nowhere near your goals.
Personal development increases your worth.
Let’s face it. Someone who is stagnant, unmoving, dormant and motionless stays in the same position they are in for as long as they refuse to take a step away from their initial post. How do you expect yourself to be promoted if you aren’t adding extra value to your output? How will people see you as someone who has potential if what you knew 10 years ago is the same thing you know now? When you develop yourself, you discover new skills, new talent, new technology and new ideas that could help you evolve and advance.
Personal development increases your confidence.
Look at each of the faces that stood beside you on graduation day. Some of them had high honors that people expect them to do quite well the moment they leave school. This stereotype has caused so many people to lose a little bit self confidence as they start believing that these people have better chances, better opportunities, and a better future than everyone else. But guess what. No one’s stopping you from exceeding them.
Personal development is the perfect solution for you to edge past these people who you believe will excel more than you. And little by little, as you see your list of skills and experience getting even longer than their academic achievements, you would also feel your confidence soaring higher.
These are just few of the things that personal development can do for you. So just imagine the possibilities the moment you step up and start putting more effort into personal development.
What You Need to Know About Free Information
Look at all the reasons given above on why personal development is important. Wouldn’t those reasons make you want to invest in yourself even more?
Now we mentioned earlier that people believe all this can be done for free. Guess what. You still have to spend on it.
Here are a few things you should think about before even thinking that developing yourself can be done for free:
Business dictates that you have to invest something before you can earn anything.
Yes, you put in work. You put in time. You put in the effort of actually searching for content that can give you real value. What do you get in return? You learn something.
But think about this analogy for a minute. An employee goes to work everyday. The employee puts in time and effort, and gets paid a (hopefully) fair salary. On the other hand, the owner of the business where the employee works gets all the profits, which is probably a few times bigger than what the employee earns even after all the costs have been deducted.
Now who would you want to be – the employee or the business owner?
When you make an actual monetary investment, you also get bigger and better results. Remember, the mere fact that personal development courses, tutorials, and other similar classes have a price means one thing – they are worth more than any free resource you find.
Not everything you find online is reliable.
Imagine how much content you find online on a daily basis. You would literally have to sift through hundreds and thousands of content before you can even gather everything you need. The worst part? Not all of it is real or reliable.
So how do you figure out which is real or not? You consult the experts. And where are the experts? Out there, holding classes for people who are willing to pay for real information.
There’s a lot of duplicate content out there.
Let’s say you want to learn more about your latest passion. You type in the most relevant keyword you can think of, and voila, a number of results come up. Now if you know the digital world pretty well, you would also know that the most valuable content can be found on the first two or three pages – anything else after that usually doesn’t matter.
Surprise, surprise. Open up the content you find on the first few pages of the search results page, and you’ll see that they all say the same thing.
It takes hours or more just to compile valuable information.
Do you actually think you can get what you need in a single sitting? When you do research, you would have to sift through hundreds and thousands of content just to get the most valuable stuff. Add to that the time you would have to put in to figure out which information is real and which one is not.
Also, there are other things that you may not be able to learn online. Sometimes, you would have to go old school to find out what’s truly important – interview people, read a few books, and a lot more.
Is it starting to sound like a lot of work? Now let’s find out what you get when you pay for your own development.
The Value of Investing in Yourself
You’re willing to pay for the food you eat. That’s because you know that it’s going to satisfy your cravings.
You’re willing to pay a lot for the clothes and shoes you wear. That’s because you know that they’re going to make you look presentable.
So why not pay for self-development classes, training courses, symposiums, and other events that would widen your knowledge about a certain topic?
When you invest money into your own development, you save time. Imagine all those hours you would be spending trying to sift through free content online. Pay for a class and you get all that information and more. No more wading through useless content. It’s everything you need right here, right now.
You also have to remember that free content would be useless if done on your own. Can you imagine adding “spent hours online trying to learn about search engine marketing” on your resume? When put on paper, what’s going to matter are the classes you attended and the trainings you completed. This would also show future clients, bosses, and partners that you take yourself seriously enough to actually shell out money. Remember, you buy products that you believe are of value to you. This also means that you should be willing to pay for something that would add value to your biggest product – yourself.
Last Minute Tips in Helping Yourself Improve
Before we end this, here are a few valuable tips that would push you to invest more time, effort and money on yourself:
- You are your biggest asset. All your tools are useless if you’re not there to make them work.
- At the end of the day, people can only shout encouragement at you, but it’s you who can make yourself move and do something.
- It’s one thing to learn something from someone you see online. It’s even better to learn something from someone you can actually talk to face to face, allowing you to ask questions and get real-time answers.
- Investing on things gives you a return that you could lose. Investing on yourself gives you the kind of return that you get to keep for the rest of your life.
Are you ready to open up bigger opportunities for yourself? Start investing on yourself and get ahead of the rest of the pack.
