Personal and mindset work, like reconditioning a jalopy

Imagine you inherit or are given a car, well in truth it's a jalopy, and the option to buy a new one doesn't exist. So your choices are to either fix it up, or use it as it is maintaining it to the bare minimum, hedging the bet that it won't break down leaving you stranded on the side of the road.

Although of course, this will happen.

If you embark on a program to recondition, you may have aspirations for it to be a rally, racing, luxury urban, green urban or off-road car. And what you envision is going to determine how you recondition it.

Not to mention the particular driving skills you'll need to master.

Since you have limited resources and you need the car to get around, it's not a once off process. It's an incremental or developmental one.

So, where do you start?

You start with the trajectory -- you want it to grow into a [insert choice] car.

And then you start with the least functional or most dysfunctional part or system. It may be the exhaust system, the suspension, parts of the engine, the electrical or parts of the body work. When that's complete you assess and move on to the next, and in time you will get back to where you started. You'll upgrade that [again] and cycle through everything else [again].

All the while developing your skills as the driver.

Personal and mindset development is much the same. If you don't want to excel, if you have no particular ambitions, there's really no point in reconditioning the car. And if you do there's multiple components, systems and sub-systems, each having their own techniques and methodologies for improving. 

So developing you intelligence is useful to a point -- did you know you can develop you intelligence, it's not a fixed asset. But without doing healing work or developing psychological robustness, which would be the same as fitting the best suspension and leaving the everything else, it's not going to work.

An intelligent and systematic approach to personal development is in the long run going to be more rewarding and successful, but initially less glamorous.

I'm not sure it ever gets glamorous ...