As medicine evolves from being reactive to preventative, the same should be true of personal development. Most personal development focuses on what we should do, but my view is that growth is often constrained less by the absence of good behaviours than by the continued presence of bad ones.

Ray Dalio argues that principles ought to come from our own encounters with reality rather than being copied wholesale from someone else’s life. Following that idea, I have tried to identify the behaviours that have most consistently held people back in my own experience, both in myself and in the people and institutions around me.

I call them the seven sins of personal development.

They are insidious because they rarely look destructive in the moment. Many are convenient, socially accepted, or even actively encouraged. But repeated over time, they weaken our agency, erode our growth, and quietly separate us from the life we could have built.

These seven behaviours are not intended as a complete theory of human failure. They are simply the patterns I have come to distrust most.

Inaction takes many forms: failing to write down an interesting thought, failing to travel somewhere we genuinely want to visit, failing to say something that needs to be said, and, of course, failing to take a risk when we should.

These acts belong to very different categories, yet their consequences often converge on one of the most powerful emotions in human life: regret. This consistency makes me suspect that inaction is not merely a collection of isolated failures, but a fundamental flaw in human behaviour. Perhaps learning to confront inaction in one area can help correct the habit more broadly.

Take wealth creation as a quantifiable example. It should be obvious by now that the world does not primarily reward people for knowing things, but for making things. This mechanism is so powerful that inherited wealth represents a steadily declining share of fortunes. Roughly three-quarters of new fortunes come from starting companies, while one-quarter comes from investing.

There is also an unexpected moral case for starting something and becoming massively successful. It can serve as a counterweight to the risk that AI concentrates wealth and power in the hands of existing incumbents.

If action is so valuable, why do people still choose inaction?

I think it is because inaction is often the path of least resistance, which makes action the difficult option. Empirically, most people and organisations choose the low-friction pathway over the optimal one. An equally damaging behaviour often follows: even when their inaction is pointed out, they become defensive rather than change.

Watching whether someone habitually chooses the path of least resistance is therefore a practical way to distinguish the great from the average.

I wish the opposite of action were merely inaction. Unfortunately, there is also a disproportionate amount of gatekeeping and sniping in our world, making life harder for those who are actually doing difficult things.

This tendency has been observed across cultures. In the West, we speak of tall poppy syndrome and crab mentality: the impulse to pull down those who are rising so that they cannot get ahead. China has long had its own version of the same observation:

It is easy to compare ourselves with others, envy their success, or even stand in their way when they try to advance. But this behaviour consumes the person who practises it.

First, it makes us excessively outward-looking. We become preoccupied with where others are, what they have achieved, and whether they deserve it. This contributes little to our own growth.

Second, it creates an unhealthy addiction to the small bursts of dopamine that come from making cheap shots. Over time, the habit does more than waste attention. It erodes character.

If gatekeeping and sniping are expressions of the darker instincts embedded in human nature, then we must learn to consciously resist them when they arise within us, and ignore them when they come from others.

A natural extension of being outwardly focused is the constant pursuit of external validation and approval.

This need is so powerful that one of the most popular books on communication, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is largely built around techniques for strategically satisfying other people’s desire for recognition. This gives me mixed feelings. At a fundamental level, it can feel manipulative rather than sincere.

Setting aside how we should treat others, pursuing external validation makes us unfree. It places us inside someone else’s evaluation framework.

This is problematic because that framework is rarely designed to maximise our best interests. It is subjective, inconsistent, vulnerable to bias, and often provides little useful guidance for our actual growth. Making our self-worth dependent on external approval is therefore both dangerous and unhelpful.

There is no useful middle ground here. We need to let go of the need for external validation.

Instead, we should cultivate an unreasonable amount of self-belief and anchor ourselves to a larger and more meaningful frame of reference.

On one hand, our self-worth should never be determined by one person, one environment, or one voice in our immediate surroundings. On the other hand, we must develop our own understanding of what greatness looks like and hold a firm belief in our worth within a context that genuinely makes sense to us.

The goal is not to become indifferent to all feedback. It is to stop confusing other people’s approval with truth.

Self-pity sits almost at the other end of external validation. It is our tendency to indulge in the past and allow what happened to define what remains possible.

The world is unforgiving in two very different ways. It is hard on people doing hard things: anyone who seriously pursues success will attract some level of criticism, resentment, or hate. Yet the world can also be toxically kind to people who remain trapped in the past. It tells us that continued indulgence is understandable, helps us rationalise why we cannot move forward, and sometimes grants suffering a kind of moral immunity.

Compassion for suffering is necessary. But compassion becomes destructive when it reinforces helplessness.

The reality is that the loss created by our continued attachment to the past may eventually exceed the loss caused by the original event. We do not need to look far to find people who have sacrificed their present and future to something that happened years ago.

This may also be controversial, but I do not think there is much useful middle ground here either. At some point, we have to let go of the past, whether it is wasted talent, lost love, missed opportunities, betrayal, tragedy, or something worse.

This does not mean denying that painful events occurred, or pretending they caused no damage. It means rejecting the idea that the past has permanent authority over the future.

A much better alternative to self-pity is to use the past constructively: extract its lessons, allow it to deepen our understanding, and then put it to work in building what comes next.

The world has not reached a state of abundance, but there is undeniably a greater abundance of goods and services than ever before. Even articles, posts, and books, the traditional carriers of knowledge, have increasingly become commodities competing for our attention.

Being a consumer is convenient in many ways. We would rather buy a pot than forge one from iron, buy furniture than manufacture it from timber, and enjoy platforms built by others rather than create them from scratch.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Division of labour is one of the foundations of civilisation. But becoming a habitual net consumer can deal two fatal blows:

Truth is fundamental to growth. Yet truth is rarely clean or binary. It’s more likely to exist on a spectrum of confidence, context, and completeness. A statement can contain a large amount of truth while still being oversimplified, commercially convenient, or misapplied.

In the business world, truth-sounding statements are often used to protect business interests. It may be true, for example, that a company can take more than a decade to reach a meaningful liquidity event. But when a venture capital fund says that its performance cannot be judged until ten years later, this may also function as fake knowledge, a broadly plausible statement used to shield the fund from accountability and transparency.

When we mistake an interested party’s framing for objective truth, we become the person whose interests are being sacrificed.

Constant consumption also fosters a solution-buying mindset. We say that turning apples into apple pie is a valuable skill. That may be true. But when the consumer pays significantly more for the pie than it would cost to make it, the transaction is not automatically in their best interest.

This happens particularly when decisions are rushed: buying miracle products for health or intelligence, paying advisers in pursuit of outsized returns, or appointing professionals before the true scope of a problem is even understood.

My unpopular truth is that buying a solution almost always means paying a premium. Sometimes the premium is justified. Often, however, we are paying not only for expertise or convenience, but also for our unwillingness to investigate, learn, or build.

If we want to achieve meaningful growth, our net consumption must become negative. We should produce more value, knowledge, ideas, and solutions than we absorb.

This is by no means easy. The modern world is saturated with consumerism, and nearly everything around us is designed to make consumption feel easier than creation.

The authenticity in our expression is disappearing fast.

Everything is now polished, softened, and forced to end on a positive note. When people are rejected, they are left staring at empty words of encouragement. In performance conversations, there is no longer bad: only good and great.

What often goes unsaid is that many of us miss the old days of direct, unfiltered, and authentic feedback.

What is worse than the loss of authenticity is the suppression of exceptionalism and a growing indifference to distinguishing the good from the bad.

This age places enormous emphasis on fairness and equality. Every student should be treated the same. Everyone should have equal access and opportunity. Gradually, this is extended into a much more questionable conclusion: that everyone is effectively the same.

But equal human worth does not imply equal ability, contribution, or performance.

One brutal truth about the world is that human progress follows a power law. A very small number of people create a disproportionate share of valuable ideas, inventions, businesses, and cultural achievements.

Before AI, we spoke of the 10x engineer: someone capable of producing ten times the value of an average engineer. With AI amplifying individual capability, we are now speaking of 1000x engineers.

The implication is uncomfortable: people should not necessarily be treated identically. In some contexts, they should be treated very differently, potentially on an exponential scale.

Performance should be connected as directly as possible to outcomes, and incentives should follow closely, with minimal subjective judgement. Talent density also matters more than ever. In a team setting, the standard is not merely an abstract ideal; it is shaped by the people who are allowed to remain within it.

When we refuse to distinguish excellence from mediocrity, we do not create fairness. We remove the conditions under which excellence can survive.

One ridiculous feature of modern institutions is that almost everything is organised linearly around time. Most degrees take roughly the same number of years. Most work follows a nine-to-five schedule. Most jobs still compensate people according to hours worked.

This has encouraged us to conflate effort with outcome.

That may be tolerable in an environment that is unable or unwilling to distinguish good from bad. But for the purpose of growth, this idea needs to be killed.

Two hours can be spent cleaning a house, or the same two hours can be used to build something new. A team can spend two quarters conducting so-called discovery, or launch something within a week and complete eleven rounds of refinement before the quarter ends. We can give equal time and attention to every call to action in our lives, or become ruthless about what deserves an opt-in.

Time may be linear. Value is not.

The exact numbers are less important than the change in what a unit of time can produce. Technology, leverage, skill, and judgement can make one hour radically more valuable than another.

Attention is ultimately the only resource we truly control, and it should remain firmly under our command.

A rule deserves our attention only when it creates value, prevents meaningful harm, or makes something important easier to remember. Everything else should have to fight for its place.