3 Ways to 10x Your Personal Development

How much you learn is based on the perception of where you are currently at and the end goal. A test usually can confirm what you were taught.

However, most things in life do not culminate into a test: learning to be in a relationship, learning to be content and happy, learning to love each other, or learning how to be responsible. Most of these things are life skills that you know you have achieved when you have “avoided” disasters.

For this type of learning you can 10x your personal development by doing the following:

#1 Cohort (or group) learning

Get into a group of like-minded or same stage people. The most important thing is to have the same general goals and values. This happens a lot in support groups, recovery groups and startup accelerators. It is no wonder that AA, Divorce Care, weight loss groups and even startups are done in a group.

This helps with three things:

Accountability. It’s one thing to face yourself in the dark, it’s another thing to face others in the light. When facing something that you have to take a day at a time, it is good that over time there should be progress towards your goal. The accountability of meeting on a regular basis helps keep yourself honest as well as your peers.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it. — John 1:5 (The Bible)

Success is relative. Oftentimes with personal development, success is not necessarily relative to one another, but rather each person has a different success metric. However, having others can help you move faster towards your inner goal of where you want to be.

Comparison should not be made on each other’s goals nor even how quickly one reaches their goals, but how fast one moves towards achieving them.

Success is more about the slope than the y-intercept.— Paul Buchheit

Therefore it is not where you begin, but where you end.

Where you start is rarely indicative of where you end.

Encouragement. More often than not the thing you are facing is harder when done by yourself. Life is meant to be lived in a community and it is no wonder that loneliness is the number one killer of people, or that people with strong community bonds live longer.

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken. — Ecclesiastes 4:9–10,12 (The Bible)

#2 Focus on one thing

Choose one thing to do and focus on that. In AA it is getting to sobriety. In Weight Watchers it is losing weight. In Y Combinator it is growth. This goal is large and meaty, and many ways to get there. That is by design. This way you can choose paths but they should all feed into what you are trying to do. It becomes the most important thing for the group to focus on.

Having that one goal enables a group or person to focus. It is amazing what type of focus that one goal can do for a group of people.

As an organization gets larger, a strategy in reducing feedback loops is to introduce a “rally cry” for the entire organization. The purpose for the rally cry is to focus the organization on one thing to create momentum. Netflix it was “Defeat Blockbuster” and for every Blockbuster that closed, a pin would change color on the US map to denote its eventual decline. For our organization our rally cry was “51% of traffic off of Facebook”. We reported on this weekly, it was top of mind and in a few months, we had achieved this goal. Within 6 months, all employees plus a guest were taken to Tahoe as a reward trip.

A rally cry is a goal that is the most important thing that needs to be done for the organization to succeed. It is usually time boxed. It reduces your feedback loop to just one thing, which creates a sense of urgency, focus, and purpose for a group of people.

#3 Timebox

There should be a beginning and an end (or milestone) to the program. Continuously meeting together without a show of progress can be debilitating and leave someone spinning in circles. There should be a clear sense of how long the program is to help kick start and focus yourself for a period of time.

This is why bootcamps are only 6 weeks, accelerator programs are 3 months and organizational rally cries are 6 months.

A deadline creates momentum and urgency. The time frame forces yourself to push yourself to the limits and surprise yourself on what you can do in that amount of time. At the end of the period you can look back and measure movement. And, when tackling personal development, movement is the one thing that matters.