The first step is to determine where they want to go.

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Personal development is the process of improving skills, attitudes, relationships, health, finances, and learning. Any or all of these areas can be targeted for improvement.

For a person to embark on a quest for self-development or personal growth, the first step is to determine where they want to go. Sit down at a desk and decide that you are going to spend some of your time writing a list. Set aside some time to do this. Make a list of 100 things you want. Not all of these things will be material. They can be, but you want to include skills and goals for things that interest you.

If you put “make $100,000,” that’s a nice goal, but you need to learn the skills that will get you there. You could put “become amazing at positioning a site on Google on page 1” as expertise. You want to learn basic skills. Another item might be learning how to make friends. So you might read “Learning to Make Friends and Influence People," by Andrew Carnegie.

Once you have your list of 100 things, you will then want to focus on just a few. Pick the top ten items on your list of 100. Yes, pick only the top ten. If you do it right, it will be difficult and painful, but you are separating the wheat from the chaff. At this point, you are defining the next 5–10 years of your life. The reason for this is that if you are serious, you will learn these skills, these relationships, and these attitudes. And spend enough time on them to become an expert at them.

You see, you have to spend time becoming an expert. That’s what it takes; time and focus. If your main desire is to become a guitar expert, you will need to learn to play one chord at a time. Start learning how to combine chords in music, and then perfect the music into beauty.

When you’ve separated your top ten things from the others on the list, see if anything is related to your top ten. Are there two or more items that might fit into a similar category? For example, one topic might be learning how to sell. A second topic might be creating a website. These are related topics that could work synergistically. In other words, the two topics together could be more powerful than each separately. So, once you learn how to create a website, learning how to sell could help you sell your website successfully.

What you are looking for and what you want to see happen is that you want to end up doing things that you are passionate about. What is it that you enjoy? You’re not going to be good at anything that you’re not passionate about. That’s a fact.

Try it. This exercise can become the foundation for everything you do in life.

The Art Of Personal Development