Truth is the first principle of personal development. We primarily grow as human beings by discovering new truths about ourselves and our reality. You’ll certainly learn some important lessons no matter how you live, but you can accelerate your growth tremendously by consciously seeking truth and deliberately turning away from falsehood and denial.
Genuine personal growth is honest growth. You can’t take shortcuts through the land of make-believe. Your first commitment must be to discover and accept new truths, no matter how difficult or unpleasant the consequences may be. You can’t solve problems if you don’t admit they exist. How can you achieve a fulfilling career if you won’t admit that your current job is wrong for you? How can you improve your relationship situation if you refuse to accept that you’ve been feeling empty and alone? How can you better your health if you won’t accept that your current habits don’t serve you?
Reality is the ultimate arbiter of truth. If your thoughts, beliefs, and actions aren’t aligned with truth, your results will suffer. Positioning yourself in this way isn’t enough to guarantee success, but siding with falsehood is enough to guarantee failure. When you align yourself with truth, your troubles won’t fix themselves overnight, but you’ll be taking an important step in the right direction.
When you deny your problems, you turn away from truth. The lies you tell yourself spawn more lies, infecting your mind with falsehoods that weave themselves into your identity. You become disconnected from your true self, living as a mere shadow of the brilliant being you were meant to be. You aren’t here to endure such an existence. You’re here to learn how to create a life of your own choosing. It’s not for me (Steve Pavlina) to say what that life should look like, but I’ll do my best to help you figure it out.
For the remainder of this chapter, I’ll take you on a guided tour of truth. This will help you understand how to identify and accept what’s true for you. These ideas can be fairly abstract, so your goal here is simply to familiarize yourself with the high-level concepts. In part II of this book, you’ll learn to apply these concepts to all areas of your life, so you’ll see exactly how they can be used to improve your results.
Let’s begin with an exploration of the key components of truth: perception, prediction, accuracy, acceptance, and self-awareness.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina