Zen monasteries already have such a test. They require that you get a written letter of recommendation from a friend of the monastery, then you must come to their gate and beg to be admitted. They always deny you. You must sit at the gate steps for 24 hours while they keep rejecting you. Eventually they let you inside the gate. Then they put you in the storage closet for a week and tell you to sit there and meditate without talking. If you complete all that, then they accept you.

Learn to discipline yourself and stick with projects.
Without that skill, you're basically fucked in life.
But also, only start projects which are highly meaningful to you.

Over time, as my tripping technique has refined, I've found that the only thing really necessary is:
Totally quiet & safe setting, zero obligations, empty stomach, courage, and after you take the substance: sit perfectly still, concentrate on the present moment, and surrender.
Always start each new substance at a lose dose.
Meditating before-hand helps to prepare the mind. You want to get all your personal stuff out of the way so you can go deep into existential questioning.
If the trip starts to get hairy, just remind yourself to surrender and get more curious about reality rather than your petty personal issues or feelings.

I have a lot of YouTubers/influencers (that might not have their own channels) that I watch but a few would be:
Actualized.org (obviously ) Improvement Pill Elisha Long Elliott Hulse What I've Learned KreativeVein Aaron Doughty Mantak Chia Alan Watts Who are your favorite YouTubers? 

@SaltyMeatballs Don't confuse growth as a human being with LP.
Yes, of course every human being's job is personal development. That's the whole game of life in a nutshell.
But LP is not that. LP is about your career and your creative output.
Regardless of whatever LP you end up having, personal growth will still be part of your function as a living being. So don't worry about that. You can, and must, do both.
You need to rephrase the question to this: What creative contribution do I want to make to the world?
Notice, your own personal growth is not that. That's for you. But what are you doing for others???
Flipping burgers at McDonalds?
That's the default you will get if you don't figure this out.

WARNING! Radical open-mindedness required (or at least preferable)!
 
Hi everyone. Today my spiritual seeking came to an end. Let's just get this out of the way so you will be more inclined to read the rest of the post.
What I want to do is provide you with a perspective on the path that will hopefully help you better navigate this terrain you might call the path to enlightenment, the Absolute, Truth, the natural state - however you prefer to call it. Like any perspective it should not be taken literally and it has certain limitations and blind spots, but nonetheless it is one that doesn't seem to be talked about here.

There are many words people use for describing enlightenment and one's existential nature. Do they point to the same thing? They may or they may not. It is important to clear up that not all "enlightened" people are equally free of ignorance, or conscious of Truth. Even though they may have different pointers for describing the same thing, some of the pointers may point to a state where subtle ignorance remains. Ignorance is the sense of there being a separate self.
 
 
 
Ignorance may fall away suddenly or gradually, but it doesn't seem to happen just any random way. The falling away of ignorance follows a certain succession of steps. You may skip steps, but you do not go through the steps in any other order. The steps I'm talking about describe one's sense of self and some key characteristics of how life is experienced. All steps except for the last are states of lesser and lesser ignorance - only the last one is free of it.

Interestingly, these steps correlate with the openness of the crown chakra. A person with a fully open crown chakra is free of ignorance. The more closed the crown chakra is, the more person's reality feels contracted. That's what the ego is - a contraction. It's not being selfish or being an asshole. People who are fully uncontracted can still act like jerks - let alone people who still have a degree of contraction. Even worse, these people may care less about their behavioral issues or even deny their existence. Enlightenment doesn't give you a flawless personality.
The openness of the crown chakra is measured on a scale of 1-1,000, with a thousand being fully open. People who have learned to measure this can thus quite accurately pinpoint a person's level of contraction. With contraction comes the sense of there being somebody behind the eyes and between the ears, and then the sense of owning a body. At this time I'm not going to say where the 1-1,000 scale originates from, I might do it some other time. If you're eager to learn more you have to do some digging. Even if you don't believe in or care for chakras, this model is still useful.
 
 
 
 
 
Now I'm going to present you with a map with the steps on the path to enlightenment, paralleled with the 1-1,000 scale, sense of self, and some key characteristics of experience. 
 
1. The Spiritual Person (500-559). This person is interested in spirituality but they're not seeking enlightenment. They're identified with their body-mind and don't know any better.
Examples: Ralph Smart, Teal Swan
2. The Spiritual Seeker (560s-580s). This person is seeking enlightenment or Truth.  They're identified with their body-mind but realize they don't know who they really are, hence they seek to find out.
Examples: probably many of you  
3. Self-Realization or No-Self (600s). This person no longer feels like they're the separate self - the sense of being the controller of actions the body takes goes away - it's like having no breaks. There's a sense of being boundless but that sense is still localized in the body (head) and does not encompass anything else. People in this state may intellectualize they're conscious of the absolute nature of reality but they really aren't. Another and the world still feel very real and there may be a strong urge to save them.
Examples: Eckhart Tolle, Fred Davis, U.G. Krishnamurti, Tony Parsons
4. Cosmic Self (700s). This person feels like they are the whole universe, and that the whole universe is inside them.
Examples: Ken Wilber, Mooji, Byron Katie, Genpo Roshi, Adyashanti (probably)
5. Unity Consciousness (800s). The nature of another is realized to be one's own self. The boundary of inner/outer fades - everything is seen as nothing. Even still, a sense of other and an external world being real remain. People on the devotional/bhakti path can remain here for a long time, usually people go through it rather briskly.
Examples: Shinzen Young (maybe), Saint John of The Cross, David Spero
6. Stabilizing In The Absolute (900s). The sense of other and an external world fades even further but is not completely gone.
Examples: Jan Esmann (until recently)
7. The Absolute or The Stateless State or Sahaja Samadhi (1,000). Everything is seen as the self. There's no other or an external world - making those projections becomes impossible. There is a sense of completion and finality, and you're free of suffering.
Examples: Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Francis Lucille, Rupert Spira, Peter Ralston, Jan Esmann (very recently), Sat Shree, Sadhguru

Some Notes About The Map
I didn't really experience 3, 4, and 6 so I can't relate to those too well. The map is not perfect: some descriptions might be too inaccurate and some people may be a step higher or lower. Certain things I said could use expanding on.

My Personal Journey & Some Words Of Advice

Until today I had been seeking for close to three years. I have tried various techniques. My record of maintaining a steady meditation habit is 40 days in a row (3 hours per day of self-inquiry). After close to 2,5 years of seeking, I found a powerful tool and it took me from spiritual seeking all the way to the absolute (it is not a psychedelic or any other drug). I have chosen not to share it in a public forum post at the given moment. You can probably find it based on stuff I've said if you're an eager researcher. It's literally a cheat code. Then again, personal development wise my life is a mess, so make of that what you will (zen devil grin). 

Drop all concepts and ideas you have of enlightenment, or at least don't take them seriously. They will be inaccurate. In a sense, enlightenment is disappointment until there's nobody left to be disappointed. Enlightenment is not hard (practice can be!), enlightenment is not special, and enlightenment is not dramatic. Don't expect flashy experiences or drastic emotional events accompanying realizations. They can happen but don't have to. For me there was pretty much none of that. 

Most importantly, remember than you're going to need a tool. You're not going to become enlightened by "giving up the search" in the way some people understand it - otherwise most of the world would be enlightened. If that tool is going to be practice, do your practice and do lots of it. Practice also has the benefit of carryover to transforming your personality and habits. Otherwise, use some of the hints in this post to find the tool I used and just do that. It'll get you enlightened probably 100s of times quicker but don't expect it to do anything else such as make you money, get you a hot girlfriend, make you stop procrastinating, make you a good person etc etc. Yes, it will probably help you and certain psychological changes happen instantly, but you might be disappointed. Doing personal development while already at sahaja samadhi is probably more fun though. Your choice  

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

At some point we have to accept that people will have different takes on enlightenment and personal dev. If we were ever going to get a solid consensus, it probably would have happened sometime in the last 3000 years, don't you think? But it hasn't and it won't because individual minds are too different and access "reality" in different ways. Have you noticed how every single teaching splitners, no matter how enlightened the master was? It happens like clockwork. Isn't that interesting? No two enlightened masters agree on everything. Hmmmm... interesting fact...
The cost of democracy and freedom is that people disagree in big ways. Reality brusts forth with diversity. No one species will ever rule the world.
I think the big mistake that people make (even enlightened people) is that they assume every mind is the same (like them), but consider the possibility that people's mind and realities are as different as their body types.
See my video: Why People Seem Crazy.
Or, you guys can continue waging these nonduality wars. I thought I had a pinned post about that somewhere? 
How spiritual can you be when you are wrapped up in questioning other people's growth? Sure, maybe they haven't reaching the deepest level of the rabbit hole yet, and maybe they're kidding themselves on some level, but they know better than you if they have experienced an improvement in their condition. This work is not about becoming perfect, but becoming relatively more pure of delusion. And that's a highly subjective notion. You never know where someone started off.
So the suggestion is: be happy for them when they say they've grown.
Or don't.
I suggest being more mindful of how you contribute to the nonduality wars and ask yourself whether that's how you really want to make use of your limited time here on Earth. I know I got better things to do.

@OnceMore Imagine being dead, but still being able to see out your eyes.
That's it in a nutshell.

@Slade There is a snowball effect that will happen.
You start with a little nugget of LP, like telling jokes, and as you work on it over the years, it will deepen, and as you contemplate the essence of what impact you're trying to make, and who you authentically are, everything will deepen in an amazing way.
Don't expect super depth from the get-go. It's like you found a diamond in the rough. Now you gotta polish it to see its full glory, which will take some years to see. Be okay with that.

A fool will only learn through suffering. The reason most people do anything is because they want to escape suffering. Anything from losing wieght to buying a new computer.
The key to life is to be conscious enough to motivate yourself into action without life having to kick you in the ass.
I was never depressed. I do this work because it's the most beautiful thing to do. For me, understanding reality is the greatest reward of being alive. Nothing else compares. And this has nothing to do with escaping suffering.
You need to learn how to change from negative to positive motivation. Otherwise your life will be miserable and mediocre. Doing the bare minimum is not how life ought to be lived.
Living to escape suffering is just so boring. If that was my life, I would rather kill myself. You have this INFINITE creation to take part in, and all you can imagine to do is live to escape suffering???