Personal Development

Believe it or not, but I have spent the majority of the day trying to learn stuff. It was kind of neat, I have been out of school for a few years (hehehe...) and needed to get back into learning again. Right now, my brain feels like mush, but also like I just ran a marathon.

Learning is necessary for you to stay at the top of your game, whatever your game may be. People look to exercise their bodies, but often forget to exercise their mind. If you do not continue to expand your knowledge, you will end up having the world pass you by. Even if you are not a technology buff, it is important to keep learning something new every day.

If you don't learn new things, you also won't have anything fun to discuss when you are with your friends or family. How many times have you gone to a family gathering and heard someone repeating the same story over and over and over ad nauseum? If you had spent even 15 minutes a day on personal development, you would have something interesting to add to any conversation, either with new or old friends.

Everyone has something they are interested in. Find out what you enjoy, then either go to the library (yeah, I know I am dating myself) or go on the Internet to research your interests. I always think of the Internet as one giant library. You can find all kinds of things you want to know about, but also some things that you didn't know you were interested in. I remember the first time I wandered around the Internet, I thought, there was really nothing I needed to see there. Now I use the Internet to research items, questions, subjects. I have used it to look up product reviews (I spent hours looking up stats on different hepa vacuums) to determine what I wanted to purchase and looking up pricing for the products to determine where to purchase.

Looking up stuff on the Internet is as unlimited as your imagination is. If you want to have some fun, go to www.Ehow.com. They have a top "How To" article. You can roam all around that site and find all kinds of things to learn about.

For those of you who like to read encyclopedias (I love doing that), go to www.Wikipedia.com. The main page has featured articles along with "in the news". From there you can wander around to your heart's content. You may see a bird outside of your home, you can go look up what type of bird it is, what it's behaviors may be, where it lives, etc. All this information may seem like trivia, but it is constantly exercising your brain. After a while, you may want to spend more than 15 minutes a day on personal development. I would recommend not going over your time limit too much, you don't want to burn out on the learning. If you stop sooner than you wish, you will look forward to learning more tomorrow.

If you are not into reading on the computer and are on limited funds, check out a used bookstore. They usually have all kinds of fun things to read. I found a really neat used bookstore in Custer. I wish I had more time to explore that store, but the rally took up the majority of my time. Next year I hope to get into Custer a little early so that I can explore more of the local shops (in particular, the used bookstore).

Keep an eye on our website, www.hawgwash.net, I am in the process of doing a major re-working of the site and hope make it more pertinent for people to use. Take care.