Here is yet another alternative view of what our lives are. This time it is not as broad as in my previous articles. I'm going to talk about how personal development applies to our lives.
The main idea of this topic is to imagine a stairway with a bunch of stairs going up. In the very beginning of this stairway the stairs are tiny and with time they generally increase in size. That's how I see human lives.
When a person is just born, he starts making very tiny steps in development. These steps are very important, as the future life of that person will depend on them. This child learns how to crawl, walk, run, pronounce words, understand words and so on. Over time the importance of this steps is diminishing but the size of the steps grows. For example, the importance of learning how to walk is much greater that graduating from a university, but graduating from a university is a much bigger step in life than learning how to walk.
The stairway that I'm talking about is essentially life itself and every person chooses how far he/she is going to go. Some people, as an example, choose to drop out of high school and go work at some fast-food restaurant, and some decide to graduate with a PhD, which, if translated into my stariway theory, means that every person decides to stop developing him/herself at some level. However, that doesn't mean that development stops completely. It might stop or it still goes on but in a different direction. That same person who dropped out of high school might rise as a sports star as an example. So, even if the development of one aspect of a human life is stopped, there might be all kinds of developments happening in other aspects.
For the sake of making this article shorter, I am going to limit the scope to only a couple of things. I'm sure my readers will be able to apply my theory to any aspect of human lives as long as I explain the theory itself well.
So far I have only been talking about steps up the stairs. But there is another component to all this: person's ability to make steps forward. While every person has the ability to make steps in general, we all differ in the
size of the steps forward we are able to make. The ability of making larger steps directly depends on how developed the person is. In other words, it depends on the size of the person's development level. So, the bigger(more developed) you are, the bigger steps you can make. Which, in turn, means that the more developed you are, the more you can do to further develop yourself. Let me explain it in an example.
Usually people that are making breakthroughs in sciences are the people, that have been in the sciences for a long time. So, even if it seems as a breakthrough for the rest of the world, it is just another(large, but evolutional) step for the person. The person has spent days and days working on something; he has been making progress over time, meaning that the steps towards the wanted result have been made all this time. Nobody would be able to achieve the same results immideately. It is a process, it is a journey up the stairway. So, the rule is:
you become bigger to make a bigger step and you only become bigger by forcing yourself to go forward.
Sometimes it so happens that the process is artificially sped up. An external event can take a person up the stairway, but if the person is not developed enough, he usually degrades(goes back a few steps or even back to original level). That is why it is very important to understand where everybody stands in terms of development, which is related to the situation. Here is an example.
Let's imagine that you finished high-school a couple of years back and you have worked in some construction company since then. Then one day you are notified that your uncle just died and you inherited a huge amount of money. That money brings you to a whole new level, and you sure will have a great time while the money is lasting. But it won't be long before you will get back to your old level, if you don't know how to manage it correctly. Another example will demonstrate my idea even better. Let's imagine that you uncle dies and you are now the owner of his multimillion company. That takes you to a stair, which you would probably have never reached by yourself. Since you have gone to that stair artificially and not evolutionally, the company is doomed, if you were to decide that you will be managing it yourself at your current development level.
So, it all boils to this:
if your personal development in a certain area is not up to par with the requirements needed to at least stay on that level, you will start degrading(going back on the stairway of life).