Hello World!

My blog will be devoted to the topic of personal development. Specifically, I will try to go into detail how personal development has quickly emerged as such an integral part of many people’s lives and what it means to those who live by it.
For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in the subject of self improvement and its relationship with what life has to offer. Initially, this deep interest in personal development and self improvement began several years ago when I was introduced to a “self-help” tape by a friend. After hearing him speak as though this tape had such a miraculous effect on his life, I doubted my friend’s recommendation and brushed off the tape, as well as other priorities in my life.
Initially, I was very reluctant to listen to the tape and understand what had intrigued my friend so much. However, as I started to listen I found that the things being said had such a strong correlation and applicability to my own life. In a sense, I felt that the person on the tape was giving me guidance and advice that I had already known; but nonetheless, it was advice that I needed to directly hear from an influential and successful individual in order to truly take initiative in directing my life.
For many though, self-help programs and motivational speakers are not understood as simplistically as the experience that I shared above. Many view motivational speakers as leaders of a marketing scam that lures and exploits the naïve for commercialized reasons; authors and speakers as merely disingenuous individuals ironically attempting to “help” others for their own self-affluency.
At this point, there are no specific topics that I’d like to blog about in regards to personal development; but I know the areas for discussion are endless. This blog will be used as a tool to analyze different personal development options, as well as act as sort of an online soapbox for everyone to objectively understand the different types of self-help methods and how it has become implemented in our everyday lives.
Whether or not my audience believes in self-help as a credible method of improving a person’s life, there are without a doubt hundreds of life coaches, professionals, speakers, and authors that have become successful as a result of the success that they have brought upon others. There are countless professional speakers and authors who earn millions of dollars each year to simply give advice to CEOs, presidents, and those with authority and power in our society. It is difficult to believe that these individuals we hold to such high regard would pay large sums of money for a product that does not work.
With this blog I’m going to question the validity and credibility of what these professional “know-it-alls” have to say about their areas they claim to possess expertise in. Specifically, this will include the writers and speakers that I have found helpful and contributors to who I am today.