Is there a platform for sharing personal growth experiences?

You are drowning in stories.

And the platforms are happy to hold your head under.

You can scroll through endless self-improvement sagas on Medium. You can get lost in the advice columns of Reddit's r/selfimprovement subreddit. You can consume perfectly polished hero's journeys on podcasts, or sign up for a slick curriculum on a site like Mindvalley.

You can spend a lifetime reading other people's maps.

I know. I used to be a map collector.

My browser was a library of bookmarks to articles that promised to change my life. My podcast queue was full of interviews with people who had already summited the mountain.

I felt informed. I felt prepared. But my boots were clean. I wasn't actually walking anywhere.

I was just a well-read coward.

It's a trap.

Because a story is a construction. The word comes from Old French, estoree, meaning "a building, a picture." When you consume someone else's growth story, you are looking at the finished architecture. You are admiring a photograph of the building. You are not on the construction site, knee-deep in mud and fear and chaos, laying the foundation brick by miserable brick.

You are not doing the work. You are consuming the evidence that someone else did.

These platforms are not the territory. They are collections of maps. And maps are useful, but only if you actually intend to travel. The goal is not to have the most detailed map collection on the block.

The goal is to get your own boots muddy.

My rule now is simple. For every hour I spend reading someone else's map, I have to spend three hours on my own trail. In the silence. Doing the reps. Facing the blank page where my own story must be written, not just read.

So I ask you.

What map are you going to fold up today so you can finally start walking?

Follow me for more dispatches from the trail.

And if you’re ready to stop collecting maps and start your own journey with a compass and a small crew, the work we do at My 12 Journeys is where you begin.

#DoTheWork #PersonalGrowth #SelfImprovement #ActionOverTheory #InformationOverload