7 Reasons Why Personal Development is Important to Your Success

Personal development is a huge topic and when people talk about personal development, it could mean a lot of things from advancing their career to the next level to living a better and more rewarding life.

Although most people have no idea what exactly personal development is and they don’t have a clear plan for it, it is a topic I believe we all must understand because life itself is continuous learning progress.

And so if you ignore or you don’t consciously make plans for improvement, you may eventually wake up one day and discover that you’re actually living a life that you don’t like and it may be too late to change by then.

This is why personal development is important. You only live once, so you want to make sure you are living a life worth living.

You don’t want to wake up at age 65 only to discover you have wasted decades into living someone else’s life and you’re not living according to your own terms and conditions.

Below are the 7 core reasons why personal development is important, especially if you want to live a fulfilling, rewarding, and more successful life:

1. Expands your perspective

First, personal development expands your perspective through continuous learning. Things are always changing, whether you like it or not. And if you continue to work at the same thing or if you refuse to improve, you will eventually be replaced by someone else.

Plus, growth is only possible when you venture out of your comfort zone. If you continue to do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got.

For instance, if you want to live a better life, earn more money, or to become healthier, you need to do something different. You need to formulate a plan to achieve your goals and resolve to stick to your goals.

But first, you need awareness. When you are aware that something is not working in your life, such as you’re not working on a job that you’re passionate about or that your health is deteriorating, it gives you the awareness that you must change.

And to raise awareness, you need to have a better perspective of what you can do in life.

For example, when you mix with wealthy people who are much more financially successful than you are, you start having the awareness that you can create more. And when that happens, you will ignite your desire to achieve more.

Personal development is important because it expands your perspective. The more you read, learn, network, the better you can be and do in life.

How do you know making $10,000 a month is good enough? You don’t until you discover someone who is making $10,000 a week, only then your perspective expands and that creates awareness in you.

It makes you ask the question, “Why am I making $10,000 a month when others are making the same amount a week?” or “What if I can make $10,000 a week too?”

Hence, when you embark on the journey of improving yourself, you automatically enlarge your perspective to live a better life.

Read: Six Ways to Expand Your Perspective

2. Improves your mental strength

Yes, personal development makes you mentally stronger. As Lao Tzu famously said:

“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.”

When you understand yourself – your strengths and weaknesses – you become better at everything you do.

For example, in a company, you can’t thrive by doing everything yourself. If you want to build a successful business, you need to rely on others. In other words, you need to delegate and outsource your weaknesses so that you can focus on your strengths.

Steve Jobs was a great leader and has great visions, but he didn’t have the necessary skills in programming. This was one of the main reasons why he relied a lot on his early partner, Steve Wozniak to build the first Apple computer.

When you know what you are good at and where you need to improve, it makes you a better person.

You can then become stronger by building a better and more powerful team to achieve bigger goals.

Not only that, when you know yourself better, you can allocate time and resources to grow on the strengths that make you a specialist in what you do. You become the best in your own niche. And this is when great things will happen.

Read: 10 Powerful Methods How to Build Your Mental Toughness

3. Grows your confidence

Confidence is important if you want to achieve your goals and live a successful life. People who lack confidence tend to procrastinate and give up on their goals because they don’t feel that they are capable to achieve them.

When you embark on the journey to improve yourself, you will learn more. When you achieved your goals, learned better skills, and become better at what you do, your level of confidence will rise. It becomes your nature to feel confident.

The more you learn about something where you lack confidence, the more confident you can become.

After all, being confident is all about getting yourself prepared. When you are fully prepared for something, you will automatically feel confident because you are ready.

Thus, personal development makes you more confident at what you do.

Read: 25 Killer Actions to Boost Your Self-Confidence

4. Makes you gritty

One of the most predictive characteristics of success is grit, not IQ, not your social ability, and certainly not your physical look. Grit is passion and perseverance.

And personal development allows you to become more gritty. In other words, the more you improve yourself from all aspects of life, the grittier you become, and the more successful you can be.

When you dig deeper into a topic, you will become more passionate about it. Think about it, how much do you know about tennis?

If you’re someone who is passionate about tennis, you will know a lot about the game; who are the top-ranking players, the kind of serves, the points, etc. Chances are, if you are not passionate about tennis, you will never bother to know more about it.

Hence, passion and knowledge work vice versa. When you learn more about a topic, it makes you passionate about it. When you are passionate about something, you will learn more about it. It is a two-way cycle.

This means that if you want to be more successful and live a more fulfilling life, commit to personal development. Learn as much as you can because you will develop grit as you develop yourself.

By the way, Angela Duckworth has written an amazing book called Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. It is one of the must-read personal development books. I suggest you get this book and read it right away.

5. Provides a sense of direction

When you work on yourself, you become clearer with what you want out of your life. And this actually gives you a sense of direction that can help you make better decisions in life.

Most people are not living their dreams and they are living in mediocrity because they don’t have a clear direction in life. They are following the crowd and they are going wherever others are going. They are lost.

But if you work on yourself, read, learn, and commit to improving your life, you will discover the things that you really want.

You are clear with your objectives in life. Decision-making becomes easier and you will never waste your time (life) on things that don’t really matter anymore.

You see, when you are clear with what you want, you know what to do and you can leverage Pareto’s 80/20 Rule to become more effective. However, when you have no idea what you want to achieve out of your life, you will try to do everything and feel lost.

When you work on developing yourself, you will understand yourself better. And when you understand yourself better, you will know what you want in life.

And that gives you a clear sense of direction of where you want to go.

Knowing what you want to achieve is the fundamentals of your success. If you are still unsure of what you want out of your life, work on improving yourself. Commit to developing yourself and make plans to get better in life.

Read: Why Clarity of Purpose is Important to Success and How to Get It

6. Improves your focus and effectiveness

Personal development gives you better clarity, as we have discussed above. And when you are clear with your objectives, you can prioritize what is important to you.

It gives you better focus and so you are able to do things with higher effectiveness.

Do you know what is the biggest obstacle to staying focused? Distraction. When you are constantly being distracted, you will never be able to produce great work. You can’t focus and you can’t give your 100%, hence, your work performance will suffer and your effectiveness goes down.

When you are committed to personal development, you become more focused. You know what you want, you have clear priorities, and you are confident that you can get it done. Hence, you improve your focus and effectiveness.

Not only that, when you are focused, you will not experience as much stress and pressure. You will only experience stress and pressure when you are feeling overwhelmed. But when you are focused, you will be able to see the big picture clearly.

And again, this explains why personal development is important and you should have a plan to improve yourself.

Read: 10 Amazing Ways How to Improve Your Focus

7. Makes you more successful

Do I need to explain this more? Once you committed to personal development and embark on the journey, you will realize that you are making progress and moving toward living a better life each day.

It may be slow and it may not happen overnight, but as long as you commit to making progress, you will eventually arrive.

A lot of people are not committed to personal development. They don’t want to read. They don’t want to learn. And they don’t want to improve themselves. This is why most of them are stuck in life.

They have no idea what they want, yet they continue to live that way. They choose to watch TV and plan for their weekends rather than spending time planning for their lives and figuring out what they want.

Don’t be like most people.

Therefore, commit to personal development. Make it your daily habit to read, learn something new, and improve yourself consistently.

Read: 21 Personal Development Tips That Will Change Your Life