Free Personal Development
I always find the idea of spending money in order to make you rich a little bizarre. Books, audio programs, seminars and courses can cost you a fortune. There is a whole ‘personal development industry’, and maybe it is doing a good job—I am curious about your experiences in that matter. Please comment if you wasted your money or got tenfold, hundredfold return on such investments. Detailed life examples are welcome!
No motivational program can motivate you if you won’t motivate yourself. It is your actions that will change your life, not anybody else’s actions, advice or good intentions.
According to 80/20 rule, 80% of success is depending on you, it isn’t sensible to allocate 80% of your budget to a 20% factor of training materials.
My experience was that I had attended events, read books, listened to tapes and nothing significant happened, and it made me suspicious about the results of any paid programs. It also made me close-minded. I was looking for ulterior motives first and then for some useful knowledge.
When I was learning from free personal development materials I was open minded and it drastically improved my effectiveness.
The devil’s advocate arguments
People who encourage you to spend your money on their products have two main arguments against free:
1. You don’t value free, so you won’t pay attention to the material and it won’t change your life.
What a stinky argument this is! I claim that if you need to spend a load of money on an item to value its worth, there is something wrong with your personal philosophy and no amount of money can fix it. First you need to shift your mindset before spending money on any paid program.
If you appreciate only things that can be represented in monetary value it indicates your attitude toward money is seriously flawed, probably in the range approaching worship. You don’t need to spend thousands to value the materials you work on. You just need to implement and distill the value out of them.
My personal experience is that the amount you pay for a tool makes exactly zilch difference to the actual implementation of the material.
I received a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen on the free training at my job. It was the first personal development book I read in many years. I was captivated by the ideas and tried to implement them, without much success. But at least I started doing something and it made me come out of my dormant state.
I borrowed the book Slight Edge from my sister. The book’s message has changed my life.
I have borrowed many other books and audio programs since then and many times they were very fruitful:
I listened to an audio version of The Ripple Effect by Darren Hardy and started a gratitude journal about my wife.
I got Start Over, Get Rich for free by subscribing to David’s Bach email list; results: $7k saved in 2 years, I was able to buy my first house.
I was involved in a few free online communities. No paid program could bring such intimacy, encouragement and deep friendships, like The Transformational Contest did. I learned most about self-publishing in the free authors’ Facebook group.
Of course, if you are a busy executive or a successful entrepreneur, spending money on personal development materials is not a big problem and certainly beats searching such materials on the Internet in your scarce spare time. Nevertheless, an ordinary mortal needs a different strategy. Having not much money to spare, he can find an hour a week for research.
2. Free is low quality.
This argument is, in fact, an implication that paid is high quality. And it’s not. While learning about self-publishing I bought an eBook for $7. It was the first ever info product I bought. And it was lame. I found better information on setting up the account on Amazon and formatting the book in a free eBook provided by Amazon. The marketing info was of some value, but Steve Scott’s book was much better and cost half the price of this first product.
I bought a Kindle keyword and profitability research tool. It cost about $100 if I remember correctly. The help section was a joke. Basic functionality was flawed, because the tool was connecting using my proxy and presented prices as I saw them on the Amazon store, with VAT tax fee, not how my American customers saw them. All profitability calculations were thus false.
In December 2013 I tried the paid Get-Rich-Quick-on-Kindle program. It cost $50 a month. I can’t imagine how they wanted to justify the price. I learned very few things from the initial 16 videos. After self-publishing 3 books I already knew 90% of the material. The videos themselves were not high quality either.
The quality-price dependence died a long time ago. Now you don’t pay for the quality of a product, but for the quality of the marketing or brand. Shoes produced by Nike, Puma or no-name small company all are manufactured in the same production process somewhere in East Asia. Their prices vary solely based on the perceived value of the brands.
Free MAY be low quality, but the same goes for paid products. The only way to check the quality is by making an actual purchase and checking it empirically. In that case, I prefer not to spend money on the unknown.
Study for free
Nowadays knowledge is free. That’s a fact. Even the biggest self-help gurus provide a lot of free materials to attract people to their products. I’m on Brian Tracy’s email list. He bombards me with discounts of his books and audio programs, but he also often sends free samples of his work—a short PDF on setting goals, a 30-minute audio about building self-confidence and so on.
On YouTube there are lot of great videos, whole Jim Rohn seminars, Brendon Burchard’s videos used in his products launches packed with useful info, great Les Brown motivational speeches and much, much more. And with modern technology you can download these videos, convert them to your preferable format and consume in any way you want. I hate learning from videos, it’s a waste of time for me, the content is so unsearchable. But I have quite a lot of time to listen to audio—my morning workout, commuting, chores. Learning from audio isn’t my preferred way, but I’ve listened to Cultivating The Unshakable Character by Jim Rohn dozen times, I know it by heart.
Amazon is full of free books on every imaginable topic. Bookmark the free parts of a few specific categories and visit them daily. There is a lot of crap produced by Kindle Gold Rushers, but from time to time you can find a real gem. The classic self-help titles, like Think and Grow Rich are available in public domain.
Gutenberg free library holds some precious classic works like Meditation by Mark Aurelius or The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
There are free communities of like minded people ready to support and encourage you for no pay whatsoever. You can join them and lose weight, develop new habits or learn self-publishing.
There are some excellent self-help blogs out there, written by practitioners who are progressing themselves and provide nonsense-free detailed guidance. A couple that I can think of, just off the top of my head, are BasicGrowth by Simon Somlai and StartGainingMomentum by Ludvig Sunström.
There are blogs about everything, where people wiser, or just more diligent, than you research specific areas. You can learn about how the human brain works or how to maintain the hormone equilibrium of your body for the optimal fitness results, all for free.
“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” — Jim Rohn
Only your imagination restricts your use of these various sources of knowledge.
You are also solely responsible for implementing this knowledge in your life. Dry facts are not going to change your life, your action will do that.
You can achieve extraordinary things just by committing yourself to such study. Matt Stone, a blogger (http://180degreehealth.com/blog/), has studied health (he admittedly bought quite a lot of books, so it wasn’t exactly a free study). He decided at one point to get a Master’s degree at university to formalize his knowledge in that area. He quit after one month because he already knew more than his professors. He now earns a 5 figure income from his blog.
Free personal development is possible
The access to knowledge is not a problem. The problem is information overload. You don’t need to pay for books, seminars and programs to progress. You need to decide what your values are, what your purpose is, and focus on them. You don’t need a credit card to grow, you just need the right personal philosophy.
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