Personal Growth Manager 1.0

Recently, I've become rather hyped up on maintaining the contacts in my address book. Despite the controversy, I'm a big fan of Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com/). I only wish there were even more services to facilitate the creation and maintenance of contacts for me. To take the idea to an extreme, I'd like to have an address book with everyone that I've met throughout my life that I thought was interesting and/or effectual in my life. You never know when you might want to get in touch and, more interestingly, it could keep you in touch.

So many contacts and relationships become, shall we say, discarded. It seems like an awful waste. Perhaps it's natural and healthy, and perhaps not. Maybe it's really only a relatively new phenomenon in the scope of human existence. Just a few hundred years ago, I doubt that the average teenager was threatening to move out and take off to become an actor on the west coast of America. I'd bet that people were more inclined to have relationships that reached back farther into their past. I'd also wager that this tended to improve the quality of their lives.

Think of losing touch with people for no good reason as analogous to purchasing something and only using it once and then purchasing the same type of item again because you've forgotten or misplaced the first one. It's very uneconomical. Even more interesting, I believe the mind favors those that we've known the longest. There's a bond there that doesn't exist for similar, yet newer, relationships. So, I say stay in touch. I think there are a lot of rewards to be had in the realms of business and personal growth.

I think the advantages that you could reap in your business life are more obvious than your personal life. There are a lot of people that we probably never speak with anymore because we'd like to forget about the type of person that we were during that phase of our life or maybe something happened between us and that person that doesn't make us feel so great. I think it's sometimes better, actually most of the time I think it's better, to communicate and confront these fears that are typically irrational. It would force us to deal with our issues and become more in touch with ourselves. I can't believe I'm saying that ... yuuk!

"The Automated Address Book 1.0?" No, I think not. Try "The Personal Growth Manager 1.0." Combine this with a diary of embarrassing moments linked to people in your address book and bam!, you could have it bug you with pop-up alerts reminding you to spend some quality time with this acquaintance and patch up that emotional pot hole! Huh! Huh! Yeah, now we're talking.