This quote explains why I'm obsessed with personal development.

Yesterday, a good friend of mine said “I’m so glad I didn’t die before figuring all this stuff out! It would have been such a shame!”.

It immediately made me think of a sentence I’d recently highlighted in a wild book I was reading by Neil Strauss:

“Life is a learned skill, but instead of teaching it, our culture force-fills developing minds with long division and capital cities—until, at the end of the mandatory period of bondage that’s hyperbolically called school, we’re sent into the world knowing little about it.

And so, left on our own to figure out the most important parts of life, we make mistakes for years until, by the time we’ve learned enough from our stumbling to be effective human beings, it’s time for us to die.”

-Neil Strauss

And there it is.

Every year I look back on the previous version of me from a year before and think “wow, he really didn’t know anything! he was so naive, so…. un self-aware!”.

And it’s this that drives me: I don’t want to die not having learned how to live life, because life is a learned skill. I’m sure i’ll still die without having figured a lot of things out, but I at least want to be on the fast track to figuring out as much as I can!

A note to Jonathan reading this in 2025: I hope you look back on the version of you writing this and say: “Wow, I’ve really come a long way since then!”.