The Great Personal Development Quotes Collection Revamped

“Knowing others is intelligence. Knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.” -- Lao Tzu

A while back I put together a comprehensive collection of personal development quotes.   It’s a combination of the wisdom of the ages + modern sages.   It was time for a revamp.  Here it is:

The Great Personal Development Quotes Collection

It's a serious collection of personal development quotes and includes lessons from the likes of Buddha, Covey, Emerson,  Gandhi, Robbins, Ziglar, and more.

Personal Development is a Way to Realize Your Potential

Personal development is a process for life where you improve your awareness, your skills, your abilities, and your potential.  Personal development shapes your growth by developing your strengths, reducing your liabilities, and expanding what you’re capable of.

You improve your potential through self-awareness, habits, practice, and feedback.

Awareness is Half the Battle

A big part of personal development is simply awareness.  For example, when you know your Myers & Briggs Personality Type, you gain insight into whether you outwardly or inwardly focused, how you prefer to take in information, how you prefer to make decisions, and how you prefer to live your outer life.

Aside from better understanding your own patterns, you can also use it to understand other people’s behavior preferences, and you can adapt your style.  If you see somebody staring blankly at you during your presentation, it doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged.  They might just be an introvert processing the information in their own quiet way.

If you know your Conflict Style, you can tailor and adapt it to the situation, as well as better understand the mode that others are operating in.

There are many models and tools for self-awareness, but the goal is the same:  learn how to be more effective in more situations based on your individual strengths, abilities, and experience.

Action is the Other Half

Personal development is a verb.   You need to take action.  All the knowledge in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t apply it.  Even thoughts are habits that we haven’t learned how to measure.  When you apply what you learn, you can adjust what you learn based on feedback and results.

If you keep in mind that personal development is about continuously improving your thinking, feeling, and doing, then it’s easier to stay focused and to evaluate your results.

You can also approach personal development in a number of ways.  Just like martial arts, there are hard-styles and there are soft-styles.  In my experience, it helps to balance and blend hard-core skill building along with building the soft skills, especially interpersonal skills and your emotional intelligence.

Personal Development Requires a Growth Mindset

If you want to grow, you have to believe you can.

If you adopt a Growth Mindset, you can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area of work and life.

In the book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, author Carol Dweck shares a lot of science and stories around how our mindset limits or enables our growth.  If we believe that our abilities are fixed traits, and that we are either good or bad at something, then we have a Fixed Mindset.

If, on the other hand, you believe that you can get better through skills development, then you have a Growth Mindset.

If you’ve ever been in any sort of elite training, or specialized skills development or had a great mentor that provides deep feedback, it should be more than obvious to you how much growth and greatness is possible.

Adapting is the Key to Personal Development Success

So if you have a Growth Mindset, and you practice personal development, and you develop your self-awareness, then what will hold you back?

Simple.   The inability or lack of willingness for you to change your approach.

Darwin taught us that nature favors the flexible and Einstein said that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

And yet, how many people get stuck in a rut or hold themselves back through limiting thought patterns or behaviors?

One of the greatest things you can possible do for your future success is to learn how to change your approach with skill.

I could say so much more about personal development but at this point, I’d rather share what some of the greatest giants in personal development have had to say.  

Use The Great Personal Development Quotes Collection to stand on the shoulders of giants, and see further, as you look inward and upward.

And if you want a jumpstart in agile personal development, check out my best-selling book on productivity:  Getting Results the Agile Way.   It’s a simple system for meaningful results, and  it’s a way to use personal development to think better, feel better, and do better in all areas of your life.