Just to review, I spent nearly a third of my life *reading* about how to live a full life instead of actually experiencing it. I was successful in my career but nowhere else – including my relationships, family, health or happiness, and I lacked an overall sense of well-being.

I’m reminded of a story that I recently heard about a wealthy family man. This man was so plagued by a desire to better know his creator that he abandoned his family and worldly goods in search for the house where God lived.

For years he searched the world, asking everyone, “Where is the house in which God lives?” Yet, he never met a soul who seemed to have any clue where God lived.

Finally, his journey took him to Tibet where he happened upon a monk tilling a field. He called to the monk, “I have been on this quest for years. Do you know where the house is in which God lives?” The monk answered pointing towards the horizon, “Everyone knows that the house of God is right over that hill.”

The man was elated! He thanked the monk and ran off quickly. As he crested the hill, he could see that, indeed, the house in which God lived was in plain view. His journey was complete. He took one look, and nodded satisfactorily, turned on his heel, and left.

Now, as my intelligent readers, you already know that the house is really your heart and the journey is your “self development”. And the point is, a lot like me, this man lost himself in his journey. He identified himself as a seeker, and not a finder. Like him, I had forgotten that the point was not self development, but self realization.

The purpose of self development is to create a life experience of yourself. Other than that, the stuff you are reading is just information. We want to experience a certain way of life and not just information and the only way to experience something is to do it. We’ve all seen the “Bucket List” there is a reason it wasn’t called “The bucket of information list.”

People call the process: self development. However, it would be better described as self renovation. The very qualities we possess at birth are the very qualities we are seeking in death. That is to say, that the authenticity, joy, openness, and faith, these are all innate to a newborn, and now, as adults we realize, hey, I’m gonna die! So we rush to reclaim what’s essentially already ours.

The only way to experience something we are missing is to do it. If you want to experience being confident, then you have to do something that’s going to scare the bejeezus out of you. If you want to experience adventure, then you might have to cut in line at the post office.

It’s not about losing 30 lbs, starting your own business, writing that novel, or reading those 10 books a year. It’s just about that one split second where you actually decide to take the next step and then doing it. Remember, writing a novel doesn’t start with writing a chapter – it starts with writing a word. Apply that to your life. The simple, succinct law of action.

On the subject of how children already have this figured out, check out this post from Upgrade Reality.

One of the virtues of being very young is that you don’t let the facts get in the way of your imagination. ~Sam Levenson

The glint in her eyes was unmistakeable. I could see her inner child so at home in her body, waiting for that moment to come. I pressed the accelerator to the floor and our car-mini-van sped down that country backroad hill towards the peak of the next hill. 50, 60, 70 miles per hour and then we hit it. One perfect instant of balance when there was no up and down, no speed or stopping, frozen in time.

“WooOoOO!!!” She let out a yell.

I couldn’t wipe the grin off of my face, “I haven’t done that since I was a kid!”

And here we were, two “grown-ups” just driving for the sake of it.

This is a principle of life that I am truly learning.

Money, gadgets, vacations and events. They all are exciting and fun and something we aspire to have/do. But the simplest joys in life come from that which is free. An hour earlier I was racking my brains for something fun to do, something exciting that we could really enjoy. But I looked at the trees and the leaves were turning, fading into oranges and reds. (How is it that the leaves know that they will one day possess all the qualities of being the same leaf that was green but now is brilliant red??) I knew in an instant what we would do and we took off down winding country roads feeling more free than I could remember in a while.

Live wild, in the moment – and you will be free. Apply this to your waking life, and heck, why not your dreams?

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