DEVELOPMENT PLAN
To truly start to grow and change, it is important to find someone who will hold you accountable to your goals and dreams. It is much easier to let yourself down than it is to let your mentor/hero down. A mentor will not let you off the hook to settle for mediocrity if that is not what you really want. The ability of a man or woman to rationalize why they are not growing and changing knows no limits, but a mentor can identify the deception and confront the potential hero with the truth in love. Let me give you an example from the 1940’s book The Rediscovery of Man:
After you have identified a mentor, the next step is to sit down with him and create a personal development plan. To leave the masses and excel in a noble life, it is essential to grow every day. Develop habits of reading great books, listening to heroic doctrine on tapes or CDs, by attending seminars, and by developing personal mentors. Jose Ortega y Gasset in his excellent book “The Revolt of the Masses” wrote:
“For me then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines statically upon itself, condemned to perpetual immobility, unless an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply the term mass to this kind of man – not so much because of his multitude as because of his inertia. As one advances in life, one realizes more and more that the majority of men – and women – are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalized, so to speak, in our experience.”
The anti-hero (mass man) is disciplined only by external forces – for example, by a job which tells him when to get up, when to go to lunch and when to go home. But the hero (noble man) is self-disciplined. When you discipline yourself more than a boss ever could, your days on a job are limited. The world will step aside for a man or woman who knows where they are going and has a plan for getting there. Do you have your plan?
