In Human Development, Patrick Whelan creates a framework to help you understand what it means to develop yourself and attain freedom, love and happiness, including painfully honest stories of his own transformation. This framework contains elements of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Abraham Maslow, Amartya Sen, Anthony Giddens, as well as Confucius, and outlines an approach for you to gain understanding of yourself and your actions, so you can simplify your life and take control of it, setting yourself free.
Patrick is a psychological philosopher with Master’s degrees in International Development and Political Theory, minoring in sociology and motivational psychology, and has spent over 10 years living and traveling across 6 continents, studying cultures, religions, languages, and people. Through this journey he came to see the common threads, revealing what it means to be human. However, this first requires unlearning much of what our societies have told us to value, so we can have power over our own lives and re-write our own story.
Genre: SELF-HELP / Personal Growth / GeneralThe English book has just been released.
My story started simple enough. I grew up as a dutiful boy in a small seaside town of about 700 in Newfoundland, Canada. My family had some land inland, so we spent much of our time either working on the farm or in the forest, cutting, carrying, and storing wood to burn as fuel, which I hated at the time, yet did my chores with few complaints.
Because there’s very little diversity in small towns in small provinces, as the top student in my grade, my future prospects were to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, as if intelligent people wouldn’t dare do anything else. Since I didn’t like the idea of handling naked old people all day, and Canadian lawyering sounded boring beyond belief, I was left with the prospect of being an engineer.
With all of that decided, my life was clearly laid out, a story signed and sealed by society. I would go to the local university to study engineering, likely meet the love of my life either in class or through a drunken hookup, graduate, get a big job, get married, buy or build a house, buy two cars and a snowmobile, have 2.5 children and a dog, holiday in the Caribbean twice per year, remodel my kitchen or bathroom every few years, save for retirement so I could spend the winters in Florida, and then die. At my funeral, people would get together to say that I was a good man and rehash my tried and true story, all while eating tuna sandwiches cut into triangles.
I saw this story when I was 16, and having pre-read it, I had already experienced it. Living it over again was of no interest to me. But, being from a small town when the Internet was still in its infancy, I had no knowledge of the world and its opportunities, leaving me stuck and going through the motions.
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Miriam Leticia Padilla Maturín
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Author review: It was a joy to work with Miriam. Communication was very timely and straightforward, and the translation was a very high quality. Many areas of my book aren't easy to translate, but Miriam did a great job at getting my points across fluently. I would definitely work with Miriam again and recommend her to anybody seeking English to Spanish translation. |
