However, that being said, I think the most profound thing I’ve come to understand [in bits] along the way, is that self development is an on going training operation conducted by one’s self that doesn’t end. You can read all the best words of advice that have ever been written, and believe them to be sound or even profound, but until you start applying consistent, self-righting effort toward your own goals, whatever they may be, you will have little say in what you get from your efforts in the long run.

I’m not just saying that if you put in your best effort (whatever that may happen to mean) you’ll at least get to whine about not getting what you wanted, that’s not the kind of “say” I’m talking about. Because if you really do work your ass off your whole life and you’re still left without a fraction of what you wanted, it’s either because you never became the master of your own actions, or because you never decided what you wanted in the first place.

The kind of “say” I’m talking about is that modicum of control that we all need to cultivate, and develop in order to gain the sort of life we’ve said we would like to attain for ourselves.

The self-help industry will never dry up. We all have room for improvement, and we all know good advice when we hear it, and because most of us never actually head good advice for very long, the market is basically perpetual.

The world we live in is replete with advisors, philosophers, yogis, religious leaders, and self-help gurus, both dead, and living (or even channeled from the dead for that matter), all of them selling and serving up hectares of potable advice from firehoses throughout the world, each solution mixed with his or her own philosophical sweeteners but most of us are either not interested, or just like splashing around in the stuff once in a while, but rarely drink it. Refreshing now and then surely, but not much to live on.

Part of the problem is that good advice, like so much we should be doing in our lives, is easier said then done. So our sages, and gurus grow out of brilliantly leveraging the axiom that if you can’t do—teach. There is nothing wrong with this, especially since teaching, is a kind of doing. So, to mix yet another metaphor, and call on yet another cliché, many of these self-made advisors and teachers are, in a way, physicians healing themselves, and as such not all should be condemned for what they’ve chosen to do with their lives.

If you’re going to spend a significant portion of your life dissatisfied with the results you’re getting, to the point of seeking advice, and trying everything within your own power and understanding to learn from your mistakes for the sake of self improvement, it’s only a natural that you would eventually have a few words you’d like to say on the subject (crazy right? I’m excusing myself for this entire blog entry here). If you hear something that makes sense, or if you figure something out on your own, it’s standard human practice to share that information with others. Only a handful of us ever actually figure out how to turn imparting their own understanding as a viable career path, so the rest of us either remain students, or become practitioners of our own evolving wisdom. It is the second of these two possibilities that I think is the ideal we all should seek to become.

Just like some people can become career students, and eventually professors of a given academic pursuit. The study of self-improvement, or attainment, can either be an intentional and admirable pursuit of greater understanding with the eventual goal to teach it to others, or it can be simply a trap caused by a fear of having to join reality. We all need professors, teachers, and advisors in our lives, but not everyone that studies should teach, not everyone that teaches should be teaching. Many of us continue to study, simply because we would rather not start learning the hard way.

We’ve all taken some advice, and gotten hurt in the process. In fact almost all great advice for getting more out of life is about getting your skin in the game, as it were. The majority of self-help being printed, and spoken these days address that reality, and much can be summed up as, “go get hurt!” Sure it’s masked in phases like “learn how to fail, and fail often” or “just do it.” This is actually great advice, but it often fails due to our own lack of continued execution. The advice isn’t faulty, or fraudulent. It just doesn’t do any of the work for us. No advice does, and that’s the problem with advice. Advice doesn’t do a goddamn thing for you! No matter what you want to do with your life, YOU HAVE TO DO IT. Nothing anyone ever tells you is ever going to make any of what you need to do, any more done.

Getting good at anything, even just getting good at being our best selves kinda sucks; at least for a little while; just like anything else we learn how to do.

So, my advice is to stop taking advice (for the most part), and start training yourself to be you. Face it, in order to succeed at being you, you’re going to get hurt from time to time. Whether it’s falling on your ass literally or figuratively, getting good at your own life, is just like any sports metaphor you want to apply. You are your own coach and player, you can bench yourself, and you can put yourself in the game, it all depends on the lessons you want to teach yourself, from your own bruises, and sore muscles, and the level of performance you want to achieve for yourself. You can grab a seat, or run another lap. That’s your call, and your action.

Enough! I’m going to go force myself to go running, just like I forced myself to write this metaphorical hodgepodge.

Godspeed coaches!