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The Most Important Project Most People Never Work On
“The best project you’ll ever work on is you.”
I know this popular saying means well, but there’s one thing it’s got wrong:
You’re not a project.
You’re a living, breathing, human being. You’re not something that can be finished, or turned in to be graded. You’re not meant to be worked on for a brief period of time, only to be forgotten about the day after you were “due.”
And yet, that’s exactly how we treat ourselves in the “real world.”
Most of us only work on ourselves for a short time, and when we don’t see any results, we stop. We give up and put the project away, tired of waiting to find out how we did.
We focus so much on outer success, pushing ourselves to do more, be more, achieve more, and earn more, that we forget completely that there’s a whole inner world that also needs to be attended to.
And attending to that inner world is actually the key to “success” in the outer world.
But it’s a whole different type of success than we’re used to.
A few years ago, I was living and working as an English teacher in South Korea.
In my second year there, I became aware that I was deeply unhappy, but trying to put on a brave face…
