Here are several points about personal growth made by Mau which I find particularly empowering:
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
I particularly like this point because it teaches you to love the mistakes you make. I find this fundamental to personal growth, because in loving your mistakes you not only find the good in what you may have thought was bad but you also learn to love yourself more as a result. By hating what you create, you essentially hate a part of yourself, for whatever you create you put a little part of who you are into that creation. However by loving your creations no matter their faults you learn to love yourself just that much more, and loving yourself is a true step towards growth.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
The idea of working with others is a corner stone in growth, because it allows you to see things through others' eyes. Without others' imput, you view things in a static way, with no new ideas or perspectives to sway your stagnant way of seeing things. However when you work with someone, no matter how well or how poorly, you learn to see things as someone else would and can better see all aspects of something. For without additional input, without changing the filter of the lens, all things begin to take on the same stark tone.
26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
This point made me laugh, because I completely agree with Mau's sentiment here. By entering an award competition, not only are you conforming to a prescribed image which is viewed as better than any other, you are lowering yourself to the opinions and judgement of others. By competing for an award, you allow other people who are no better than yourself to compare you to others around you and tell you whether you are better or worse than them. We are all different and beautiful and good in our own rights, and for someone to tell you that you are not the best isn't just wrong, it's bad for your self love and personal growth.
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While I respect your opinion regarding award competitions, my opinion differs. I have entered award competitions for my poetry and essays and lost and felt that it was just part of the process. I guess I had to toughen up a little after an English professor of mine told me that professional writers are denied publication 70-90% of the time, which means that it's not necessarily about how good your work is, but rather who is on the panel and what their preferences are. But I have also won some awards and earned extra income, which has helped me to put off taking out student loans. For me, it's not about letting others judge my work and the implications winning or losing has for my self-esteem, but about financial necessity.
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