On Personal Growth And Business Growth
As you grow, so will your business.
5 simple indicators on personal growth and business growth.
When I was young, there's a social phenomena that I never understood. And it's immature people with lots of money...
How do they do it? Will it last? And why not me!
But as I continue to grow, I clearly began realizing these types are rare and mostly portrayed on television.
I knew about overnight successes and social media stars when I was young, but lately I've realized there are MANY more successful people that I've never even heard of until recently.
Authors, marketers, business owners, and people who work on the back end of things, but making massive things happen in the common world.
And when they communicate, they come off very wise in their decision making.
And some of these lives have been documented over the years, just not in mainstream media.
For example, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
And if you look closely you'll realize these guys are growing in a more personal way...
They're growing more than just finance, technology and bald spots.
The success stories I followed when I was younger seemed to have ended up on Behind the Music where they blew millions in just a few years or less.
When I began focusing how to grow in personal development, it directly impacted the growth of my business.
I now keep my eyes peeled to the real successful players of the entrepreneurial game...those who grow personally in order for their business to grow along with them.
Here are 5 simple things I've noticed and learned so far when it comes to personal and business growth...
Start from the bottom up
Looking back on what I believed success was, it always seemed like they were the fortunate ones.
The equation was simple, someone blows up with fame and makes millions. That's it.
This may seem overwhelming now.
I wouldn't mind a million overnight, but that won't happen, and if it did happen, I probably wouldn't attempt to be in business because I may succumb to spending my last dollar sipping a coconut cocktail in the shores of Greece only to come home and submit my application for a new office job.
On the other hand, imagine if a million was made after a decade (hopefully sooner) of being in business.
All the hard work, blood sweat and tears will make you see your bank balance differently.
Those zeros on your account was caused by years of your life trying to figure it out. So what now?
Your next move will have a completely different mindset because your personal experiences developed you.
But I'd like to mention something more about starting from the ground up...and that's aligning the basics for your foundation for growth to occur.
There may be a lot to say here when it comes to making sure your preferred fundamentals are in place.
But ask yourself this question to make the most of this lesson:
​What things can you put in place to make your inevitable reality happen automatically?
If you're looking for a place to start, I'd say at the most basic level of starting from the ground up is your health.
It's where you drive up your energy levels and your abilities to be a developed badass.
The importance of mental models
Finding this out was a game changer for me.
Not to go too deep in the rabbit hole here, but we think in feelings, symbols and little chunks of information.
These concepts then get extrapolated when we use them.
And mental models are like maps in your mind, giving you directions.
I'll give you some examples of simple mental models: the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule), Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and Freud's iceberg showing you that the tip is your conscious and the large bottom underwater is in the unconscious processes in your mind.
I believe learning mental models that work is pivotal to development because it speeds you up in the direction you're headed.
They're shortcuts to outcomes sophistically created for you to understand and pull out of your toolbox for use.
But to make them even more valuable, imagine being able to mix and match them into a making a complex thought more easier to understand.
For example we can combine the previously aforementioned mental models to make an optimized mental model/diagram of how the mind works:
Your conscious is like the Pareto principle, 20% the tip of the iceberg, while the unconscious 80% relies heavily on the bottom of the iceberg, which is shaped like a triangle just like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs where sex, trust, safety, and status are located.
Tweaking and optimizing
The above may not be 100% accurate, but it's a simple way to shortcut into a glimpse of a complex topic with a simple example.
Never believe in anything too much, because there may come a time where it's not true.
This is how biases are formed, and how one track minds are formed.
But if its working for now, I say stick with it until you reach a location in your mental map where you need to get back on track.
But you have to be able to recognize that when it happens...
Keep an eye out on how other bits and pieces of information can add to your beliefs; and be ok with other mental models contradicting and challenging you.
Being open to this allows an emergence of a wiser mental model to form where it takes your old map and a new map to guide you in your direction.
There's a fascinating mental model called Spiral Dynamics by Christopher C. Cowan and Don Edward Beck, where the current top of Psychological development includes contradicting beliefs as an integration of one belief as a whole.
Kind of like a birds eye view of seeing all beliefs and how they are in different perspectives.
Novelty
You can't change without changing.
The good news is novelty is like having fun in the process of changing.
Going on vacation, meeting new people, doing things differently deliberately - just to see what it's like.
Novelty is like a vacation from your own beliefs and seeing if it's still the same when you get back.
Everytime I leave town and come back, I have to fix all the errors and hiccups that occurred while I was gone, BUT I am doing it differently...more optimized.
I get a better sense of what's working, and what's not working. And it's almost like a new view on how I was doing things to how I can do them from now on.
Discerning opportunities
You may be thinking where's the section on how all this affects business growth?
Well I believe it all comes down to discerning...
Having or showing good judgment.
With the experience of starting from the ground up, the mental models to shortcut developing experiences, the multiple points of views, and with hardened insights of novelty you are now in a much better position to discern your opportunities.
You'll be far better equipped to understanding human decision making:
- discerning the right things to say when negotiating,
- discerning who to hire, or who you'd like to stay in touch with,
- discerning what your numbers mean,
- discerning if its worth your time,
- discerning whether to say yes or no,
- discerning whether this is a long term or short term investment,
- discerning what is valuable to you
As you develop yourself, so will the decisions you make in business.
Development turns your mental map into a business blueprint of fine-tuned decision making!
