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The social world can be seen as comprising many competing ideas and values. I will address two ideas that have implications for an individual's development. The first notion states that people should always seek to develop themselves and that self-development does not have a conclusion. The second idea is that of the fully-developed self or the "fully-human" being. The reason that these ideas compete is that one suggests that we accept people as they are, but the other suggests that there is room for improvement. Of course, a continuum can be seen to exist between these poles. Whether people accept others or not depends on the extreme that they tend toward.

An apt demonstration of this contradiction can be drawn from my own experience. On my first performance appraisal, I was told by one supervisor that my apparent lack of emotion was not a good thing. A few days later, the same person mentioned to be that aspects of someone's personality cannot be good or bad, but merely a feature of that person. I immediately thought that it could be applied to my situation. The problem was very clear to me. While we need to improve ourselves in terms of social relations, we need to survive on that very concept of "self" that we have. It is ridiculous to believe that we should modify ourselves each time someone brings a perceived flaw to our attention. This is because there is no absolute strength or weakness in a quality. There will be differing levels of social acceptability or compatibility. Since we cannot please everyone, we should not attempt the improbable. Any such attempt to do so will obtain a level of unhappiness and dissonance.

A stable notion of self is preferable. Through actions, we tell people that this is who we are. In a few cases, others may try to modify that. Those are the ones who may not understand that personality and habits are separate concepts. There was a time when I tried to modify myself constantly. Only when I did this, I realised that it is difficult to remove some aspects of one's interaction with people without affecting one's well-being. After that epiphany, I decided to focus more on the reality of my thoughts, ideas and feelings. I recognise that I would meet people with different levels of confidence and sometimes diametrically opposite preferences. For example, some people thought my style of conversing was condescending. I decided to look at the sum of my interactions with people, to see if there was any truth in it. I eventually

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