Insufficient as found

The self-development industry survives on a single premise it never examines. Once you accept that premise, you’re a customer forever. Here it is: you are insufficient as found.

There’s always another gap between who you are and who you should become. They don’t sell arrival. They sell the journey, which conveniently never ends.

Call them monsters. They need your dissatisfaction. It’s the only thing they eat.

So don’t pursue, seek, develop or grow anything. Except cucumbers. Grow cucumbers. You don’t develop a cucumber. You don’t facilitate its growth journey. You plant it, and it does what cucumbers do.

Just sit there. Take a breath. Nobody’s charging for this one. And another one. It’s the best way to starve the monsters.

I won’t say you’re perfect or lovely just as you are, because frankly I don’t know you. I’m hardly perfect myself. It doesn’t matter.

You are. I am.

So you want to grow or develop. Fine, for a purpose.

Not from a faulty premise.

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In the same vein

What you chase as a project is what you lose. Here it's growth; in Abandon All Hope of Mattering it's influence, which arrives only once you stop trying to have it.

Whose Accounting? asks what happens when you audit your life with criteria absorbed from elsewhere; this piece declines to run the audit at all.