EDIT: Read Part Two!
I began in an entrepeneurial spirit at an early age. I remember being 11 years old and making these plastic keychains and I would walk around the neighborhood giving my sales pitch. I remember the pride I took in laying them out on a piece of black satin fabric that my mom had given me to create a shadow box. A few years later, at the age of 14, I created a social site that was targeted for young people of faith, and it ended up reaching thousands of people with memberships of above 10,000. This site brought me not only financial benefits but also sparked my geographic relocation and the establishment of some life-long friendships.
I remember getting a copy of “Good To Great” when I was about 16 years old, during the time that I was doing web design, and running a social network. By 18, I was married and decided to start a business with my brother and a co-worker who worked at my dad’s computer store. I was inspired in part by the story of Autodesk (http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html) and we forged ahead on our business which was a short term disaster and ended shortly after it began, primarily because we didn’t have the financial support or the time to dedicate to it.
I decided shortly thereafter that it was only these great ideas that I wanted to pursue, so I started gathering a small collection of self help volumes, and pushed my time into making a living. I was very successful in the corporate world, moving from a technician to Manager in 4 short years. I felt pretty great about myself; no college degree, no certifications or formal training, and I was managing a corporate IT department – at 25! Unfortunately for me, I had ignored all of my dreams, as well as my own health and I found myself sitting in a doctor’s office being told that I had a chronic, debilitating disease called Crohn’s Disease.
Suddenly, the pieces started to fall together and I realized that I was 25 years old. It had essentially been 10 years since I last did something “great” (my social networking site) and I was being asked if I did or did not want them to take out pieces of my intestine. Talk about a wake-up call!
Basically, my life worked like this: When I walked in those doors in the “glass tower” (so to speak) at my corporate office, my life made sense. I called the shots, and got paid well. But the minute I walked out of the doors, my life lacked meaning. I was unhappy, lonely, and I lived my life as a victim. So it was no wonder that it took a medical catastrophe to wake me up to that fact. From the outside, it appeared as if I was very successful!
It was at this point that I realized that all the self help books and articles I had read or believed in had only done damage to my life because of my *limited perspective*. My focus on Self Development had resulted in:
1. A stark comparison to my life and immobilization.
2. A sense of being overwhelmed by all that I need to change.
3. Living in a patty-cake world of in-authentic optimism.
4. A false idea that self esteem was about telling me that I was “OK!” where I was at.
5. An arsenal of tools that I did not know which to focus on first.
In summary, I got the idea that I should focus on the “positive” (my success in the corporate world) and my superior power of deduction got the false idea that meant the “negative” did not matter.
This is not to say Self Development is bad, I will continue in Part II on how Self Development can ruin your life.
Stay tuned!
To all the above,
Eli
