Every step of the way I was wrong. About everything. All throughout my life, I was flat-out wrong about myself, others, society, culture, the world, the universe, everything. And I hope that will continue to be the case for the rest of my life.
Just as Present Mark can look back on Past Mark’s every flaw and mistake, one day Future Mark will look back on Present Mark’s assumptions and notice similar flaws. And that will be a good thing. Because that will mean I have grown.
There’s that famous Michael Jordan quote about failing over and over and over again, and that’s why he succeeds. Well, I am always wrong about everything, and that’s why my life improves.
We don't want to hear that we're wrong. But we have to in order to grow.
We don’t want to hear that we’re wrong. But we need to in order to grow.
Knowledge is an eternal iterative process. We don’t go from “wrong” to “right” once we discover the capital-T Truth. Rather, we go from partially wrong to slightly less wrong, to slightly less wrong than that, to even less wrong than that, and so on. We approach the capital-T truth, but never reach it.
Therefore, from a perspective of happiness/purpose, we should not seek to find the ultimate “right” answer for ourselves, but rather seek to chip away at the ways which we’re wrong today so that we’re a little less wrong tomorrow.
When looked at from this perspective, personal development can actually be quite scientific. The hypotheses are our beliefs. Our actions and behaviors are the experiments. The resulting internal emotions and thought patterns are our data. We can then take those and compare them to our original beliefs and then integrate them into our overall understanding of our needs and emotional make-up for the future.
This approach to personal development is superior because it relies on experience first and foremost, and then proper interpretation of experience through various belief systems second.
For example, let’s say you aspire to be a professional writer. You have assumptions you’ve made about yourself — you’re creative, you love to express yourself, people enjoy your writing, you would be happy writing every day, and so on. And now you want to pursue an end-goal of turning that into a profession.
I get tons of emails from people in this situation and they all ask the same question, “What should I do?”
Good one