Personal development has become a key issue for the 21st Century. It seems the evolutionary growth and development of the human brain led us out of Africa to colonize the world, to develop communities, master the natural resources of the lands and grow our population to dominate the world. Our brain led us out of the Dark Ages into the light of reason and science which paved the way to improve the lives of the human population.

According to Steven Pinker and his incredibly important work from his 2018 book “Enlightenment Now” shows us the data that the world is a much better place and that the philosophy of the Enlightenment was a success. It empowered humans to use our brains to better make sense of the world around us and begin to live lives of purpose and meaning.

The Enlightenment philosophy created the industrial revolutions that built machines to do the physical labor freeing our minds to further develop unleashing creativity and literacy further improving our lives. Our creative brains led us to develop the sciences that would build our new world and ushered in the Information Age starting about seventy years ago with Claude Shannon. The proliferation of books, education and arguably more important the dialogue, arguments, and sharing of ideas fueled the modern world building the Digital Age hyper-connecting humanity on their pocket computers.

The Internet converging with the Smart Phone has leveled the playing field where billionaires use the same device as the people from rural China and Africa. The accessibility to the worlds knowledge for anyone, anywhere changes the game with a shift to our truly human attributes and skills.

Even our values are changing as we get tired of ancient beliefs and arguments that have no basis in reality. The philosophy what used to serve humans is no longer satisfactory. We shifted from a slavery mentality to one that includes all of humanity and now all of life including the planet itself. The Dalai Lama once claimed the ultimate purpose of humans is “the pursuit of happiness” which mirrored the Declaration of Independence and that may well have been throughout the 20th century but seems we are entering into a new age, an Age of Intelligence that is augmented with machines soon to use Artificial General Intelligence.

The machines of the Industrial Revolution freed us from physical labor that helped us further develop our cognitive capacities. The Age of Intelligence has ushered in Big Data, AI, the Omics, including the Connectome, the Microbiome and the Exposome, created intelligent machines that outperform humans millions-to-one which we need to do the processing to help us figure out the complexities of the human mind, the universe, the Omics and more important the existential problems facing the world.

As super computers and intelligent systems augment our cognitive tasks pushing us to Peak Brain (Educational Neuroscience) it is clear that leaves humans to do the things that make us truly human, to focus on the skills that computers can’t do well (at least for now) and enable us to flourish together. This is the Age of Personal Development enabling a thinking, feeling, breathing human to grow beyond their tribal mentalities, develop one’s self to create a life of purpose and meaning and the courage to extend that far beyond one’s family unit as far into society as one can.

If your blessed to be born with a really high IQ then you will likely be led and educated in the fields that require high levels of cognition, even then to develop personal and soft skills will only serve you to be a better communicator, project manager, team collaborator and/or self-leader to benefit your career and add value to the organization. The rest of us will have more pressure to develop excellent personal skills to aid us in being better employee’s, better managers, increase our creative and innovative capacities, better friends, family members and contributors to society.

Based on thousands of hours research, fifty years life experience, data from dozens scientists and educational institutions Daniel argues that personal development is one the key human issues for the 21st century. He explains how he came to this conclusion and suggests a path or a system one can use to identify one’s own intelligences, surface what is truly important, enhance one’s opportunities and regardless of how life works out to have purpose, meaning and direction.

He invites dialogue on the subject to refine our understanding and applications to ensure positive results, create a community sharing ideas and experiences and enjoy the journey of personal growth.