Archives for October 2006

Personal Development Ideas Community Search

October 24, 2006 by Gleb Reys 46 Comments

Google has just announced a great new feature which allows anyone to enjoy a fully customized search engine. The main advantage is that it allows you to search many sites instead of one, and you can specifically search through only their pages and not the whole Web. I just cannot resist to such an opportunity, and that’s why I present you our very own Personal Development Search.

I have made many friends in the past half a year of my involvement with personal development, and I would really like you all to join this search page and make it easier for anyone to find your great articles. Our community around Personal Development Ideas grows slowly but surely, and I see this search page as a great opportunity for us all to grow and make this project a more useful resource for all.

So, if you want me to add your website to the Personal Development search, please leave URLs in comments to this post, and I’ll post an update as I make progress adding them to the search. Of course, you’re also more than welcome to email me directly or use the contact form.

At this stage, I don’t want to take my chances by adding your websites to the search myself, and so I would really like you to share your URLs in a comment to this post. After the initial submission period is over (I expect it to be two weeks or so), I will start adding more websites to the search myself.

I’m telling you, I’m really excited about this – something tells me this is going to be a great search page for everyone interested in personal development, motivation, productivity and time management.

Thanks in advance for sharing your links!

Support the Personal Development Ideas project

October 20, 2006 by Gleb Reys 3 Comments

Updating my Amazon’s wish list to keep track of the next few books to buy and read, I’ve decided to put a link to it in the sidebar of this blog. A few more things came to my mind, and that’s how they all quickly grew into a separate Support this site section.

I’m really happy with the progress of this project so far, and I benefit from it in many ways. At the same time, I always feel there is more to be learned and shared, and I notice myself spending increasingly more time doing research, finding new people to talk to and learn from, exploring software and reading books.

I can definitely use some help to make Personal Development Ideas an even better place for all of us, and here’s what YOU can do:

Share your knowledge and help me grow

I find your emails and advices to be most useful, and I would love to get more of them as they keep me motivated and help me grow. Please feel free to do any of the following:

share your personal advice (just use this contact form to send me an e-mail)
point me to an article you find relevant and interesting (your own ones are most valued ones for me as they come from your own experience)
suggest me a book I should read. If you feel particularly grateful for some article of mine or just want to be generous – please buy me a book from my Amazon wish list.
suggest a software you think is useful. If you’re an author of a software package – please send me a copy of it. If you want me to review it (and post a summary of it here on my pages), just ask!
suggest me an audio program – there are so many around, that I could definitely use your suggestions and friendly advices

Help PersonalDevelopment.ie grow

I wish I could spend even more time working on this project, but even at its current pace I see it finally shaping up. I’ve got many more plans and ideas for it, but your opinion is always valued, so please let me know if you want to help:

link to Personal Development blog main page or any article you found useful on my site (PLEASE tell me if you do it without using trackbacks, so that I have a better chance of noticing and thanking you for this) from your websites. I don’t have a link exchange block setup just yet, so I can’t promise a permanent link back to you, but I can certainly suggest your website in one of my Saturday Links weekly posts
suggest my website to your friends which could benefit from it (if you feel like nobody will really benefit, please tell me why and I promise to fix the situation!)
bookmark my pages in your social bookmarks service (del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, digg and anything else you use)
take time to leave a comment to this post
let me know what you would like to see changed/improved about this site (you might find the feedback form to be most useful for this and I’ll be sure to continue our email conversation)

Donate

If you feel like making a small donation, please use any of this to do so, and be assured that all your help is greatly appreciated:

send me a book on personal development you’ve already read yourself
use the PayPal donation button on the sidebar
send me your software package and give me a registration key
buy me a book from my Amazon wish list

Are you still reading?! Incredible! You must be one of my loyal and regular readers, which makes you one of the most important and valued visitors to go through my pages. THANK YOU for all the help and attention, your continuous support means a lot to me.

pS: if you’re not a regular reader yet, this is even more impressive that you’re still reading these lines. THANK YOU too! Please come back again, I’ll be sure to have something interesting ready.

3 Golden Rules of Goal Setting

October 19, 2006 by Gleb Reys 12 Comments

Have you ever had a goal which you never managed to achieve? Can you think of how attractive and real something seemed to you for a short while, yet as time passed by you couldn’t achieve it? Then this article is for you.

I would like to share with you the three basic rules of goal setting, and while I totally agree that success of your goals is largely based on your personality and relevant skills, I also want to make sure that you know these rules of the game before you try playing it.

The bottom line is this: If you’re aware of these rules, they make goal setting a much easier process, and greatly increase the probability of your success.

Rule 1: Make sure your goal is valuable

It is very important for you to realize how valuable to you and to others a particular goal is. You need to be absolutely clear about this rule – it will save you from going after many irrelevant or useless goals in your life.

Just think about it: how successful anything can be if you’re not really interested? Without proper motivation, you will be limiting your productivity to only a tiny portion of your true potential.

In goal setting, each of your goals has to be valuable and important. And even if you think you know what the value is, please take some time and write it down. Write as much as you can, and do it in a fashion you’d use if you had to explain why your goal is important to someone else. Use all the arguments you have, and don’t go further in your goal setting process until you have a list of positive outcomes which achieving a particular goal is going to give you.

Rule 2: Make sure your goal is an absolute necessity

If you think you can go on without having a certain goal, this is probably true. And it’s therefore a very good sign that the goal you’ve chosen isn’t real or isn’t important for you. Unless your goal is something you absolutely must do, there is no point even trying – because anything you think you should be doing has practically no chance of ever being realized to its potential, compared to things you know you must do.

If some goal seems like a good idea to you, just collect it – write it down and get back to it regularly when doing your goals review (surely you have such reviews now and then, don’t you?). Make sure you check back on it sometime later to confirm whether it’s important and critical enough for you to make it a real goal.

Don’t make something your goal just because it seems like a good idea – because this will save you a frustration few months down the line when you review your goals and realize you haven’t done anything about some goals.

Timing is very important in goal setting, because if you make something your goal too early, you may get disappointed very quickly, and never come back to it, thus losing yet another chance to succeed. If there is not enough urgency, and if you don’t see why you absolutely must make something a goal, this usually means that it’s not a goal for you yet.

Rule 3: Achieving a goal is a process, not just a result

This rule is something most people tend to neglect. They set new goals, and spend their time and efforts trying to achieve them, but never really take time to realize that achieving a goal is a process they’re supposed to enjoy. If you keep this rule in mind, you can easily review each of your potential goals to see how good they are going to be.

Just ask yourself a few questions like these:

How do I see the process of achieving this goal?
Am I going to enjoy achieving this goal?
How long am I going to be trying to achieve this goal? Am I going to be motivated and interested enough over this period of time?

I’ve once mentioned that goals are much easier to achieve if you treat them like outcomes. This way, you know you’re going to achieve the goal, because you can’t do anything without some kind of outcome. It could be a success or a failure, but it’s definitely going to be an outcome.

That being said, it is really important to make sure you will enjoy the process of achieving the outcome. You don’t want to set goals which will mean long months or even years of physical exhaustion, lack of sleeping hours and other deprivations just for the sake of a really good outcome.

No goal is going to work for you if that’s the case. Setting a long-term goal must take into account the fact that you will want to maintain your life standards. If it’s anything long-term, you have to be thinking of subtle changes to your lifestyle which will mean the desired outcome in long-term, and not some inhumane methods which you will not be able to sustain anyway.

If you put any goal of yours in a long-term perspective, and it seems too hard for you to accomplish, the chances are that it is going to be even harder when you try it, and this means you have to restructure or even reconsider your goal.

There you have it. These 3 rules are the very basic requirements for your goal setting. Look at them as both your guides and your guards . They have the power to lead you towards success and keep you away from unnecessary failures. Learn to use these principles in your goal setting, and I’m sure you will enjoy the success you deserve.

Follow comments up with email notifications

October 5, 2006 by Gleb Reys 7 Comments

I’ve just activated a plugin which allows you to subscribe to any post comments using your email. This should make it much easier for you to track those posts and comments you’re particularly interested in.

From now on, you should see a tick box under just under the new comment tex area, which reads like this:

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail

Just make sure your email in the appropriate field is spelled correctly, and tick the box – that’s all you need to receive any further comments everyone else will make to a post.

I’m working on the new design for this site, so if you have any suggestions – please let me know and I’ll do everything to make your experience with my blog easy and pleasant. Thanks!

Happy birthday, StevePavlina.Com! :)

October 2, 2006 by Gleb Reys 1 Comment

Steve Pavlina has just posted a two-year anniversary summary on his blog, and I just couldn’t help but use this opportunity to thank him.

It’s been a good year so far for me, thanks to my decision to start my own personal development blog back in January, and in many ways, Steve Pavlina was the motivation I needed to start this project.

Here are the three main things I’d like to thank Steve Pavlina for:

Generating passive income by doing something you really love

This was no revelation for me, but having this point stressed out by someone so determined and successful was definitely a help.

Seeing so many similarities between myself and Steve (mainly along the lines of having IT background and trying to always improve myself in various ways), I’ve discovered another passion of mine – the passion of self growth. I’ve been enjoying a steady growth in many aspects of my personal and professional life over the past 10 years of my life, but it never struck me that personal development could be a yet another direction for me to try so many new exciting ideas, enjoy the process of making them work and earn me some income, and gain additional motivation by realizing I can benefit from it in so many ways.

Mind you, I have had another quite successful blog project before I started Personal Development Ideas, so it wasn’t all that new to me. But I was amazed how easy and natural it felt to discover another passion of mine. This definitely helped me realize that it’s never too late to learn, and that any minute you can discover a completely new side of your own personality.

The power of focus and determination

Through all the years of his success, Steve had been a self-made person. He was always willing to experiment and explore, to obtain new skills and work out new habits, to change his perception of reality and apply his knowledge to provide value to others.

Steve is a perfect example of what focus and determination can help you achieve. He stresses the point of living consciously, and highlights that making decisions about your current and future life and applying the focus can help you grow tremendously and achieve any success you like.I really liked his attitude back when I first read one of his articles, and once again it seemed very familiar to me.

I’ve achieved many things before, and seeing him prove the point made me even more focused and determined on my self growth.

True spirit of sharing knowledge and giving value

This is one more thing I find brilliant about Steve and his website. He writes interesting and useful content, and he never grows tired of sharing his knowledge and providing value to his readers.

I’m still reading through his archives from time to time – print a certain month of his articles and read them like a book. It is very easy to see how Steve has grown personally over the past two years, and seeing striking similarities here and there helps me see that I’m moving in the right direction.

Sharing knowledge must be one of the most rewarding things you can ever do. Teaching others to break out of their own limitations and enjoy the benefits of self-growth is a tedious task. It is rather hard to resonate with so many readers, and to be truly successful you’re supposed to be passionate about your topic, knowledgeable and willing to share your wisdom.

I’ve learned many lessons from Steve, and I’m sure I will learn more. I certainly appreciate his ability to show me new ways to grow and new ideas to try.

Happy birthday, Steve! Looking forward to your project’s year three! :)