Believe in Personal Progress

When we are young, we are usually highly motivated to study new things. This may be applicable to purely scientific knowledge, languages, soft skills, physical performance, power and endurance. When you get somewhat older, say +50 years, you might be tempted to think that such high investment in personal progress makes less sense. Why is that? Because the ROI, the Return on Investment seems to go down with age. The investment tends to go up, as the required effort seems to increase with age. At the same time, the direct benefit tends to go down, as the remaining time to benefit from the acquired skills goes down as well. We tend to think: this is not going to work and if it does, it will not bring anything.

Recently, we had the pleasure of receiving training from a Shaolin monk. At some point in time, we stood in awe for the exceptional skills he had acquired in his life through physical exercise. He pointed out: even if you don’t believe it, if you practice, you will increase in strength, whether you like it or not and whether you believe it or not. Practising increases your strength, independent of your belief whether your strength will finally increase. This is an interesting thought.

So it could be worthwhile to abandon all cynicism and worrying and acquire new capabilities altogether. We will benefit from it, even if we don’t notice at the beginning. We may notice after a month or a year, that we have increased our capabilities, whether we believed we could do it or not.

I refer to my earlier blog: “Belief creates the actual Fact”, “The Virtue of Patience and the 10 000 hour Rule” and "Mens Sana in Corpore Sano".

Picture: Seneca statue in Cordoba, Spain