A Simple Formula to Measure your Personal Growth and Grow it by 100X this Year.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

It was January of 2018 and everyone got into the mode of setting New Year Resolution. I am the same, maybe just a little bit different because I set my goals in November 2017 and carried it into 2018.

I am fully committed in my goal: To have a Personal Growth of 100X.

Rewind back a few months, I had just left my job to pursue my “passion” of starting my own business. Weeks later, Freedom checked ✓ Happiness checked ✓ Stress-level non-existence checked ✓ Financial Prudency ✗ Business ✗. The jump from being employed for 9 straight years in a government job to straight self-employment is huge. So huge that I do not really know how to orientate myself and ground myself. I continued to dine at my favourite restaurant lead the life that I had prior. Before I knew it, I realised that I have ran out of money.

This was a huge reality check.

I had squandered away the savings that I built for years as capital for my startup. I had not made any progress in building any meaningful business. I was in a horrible state.

Do you still want to change the world?

This question came up subconsciously, I knew the resolve on my answer but I had done everything the opposite way. That moment was my wake-up call, my point of no return and the turning point I needed. I cleaned myself up and started bringing work back to the table, my best work (the kind that you produce from your heart). I got back to setting goals and religiously follow them by the book every single day. I even went to the supermarket to record raw material prices so that I can prepare cheap meals to reduce my burn:

I am 100% committed because I want to achieve my goal. There was no way out.

It was not until 15 January when my mentor told me to have a review on all my goals that I decided to make all my goals SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely). Now, I had been fairly comfortable setting goals that were not numbers-specific because I believed that trying to achieve a goal too measurable would corrupt us. Take for example, my goal was to walk my dog 20 mins everyday. On somedays, you would just find yourself cutting shorter like 18 mins, then to 15 mins, to 10 mins and eventually just stop altogether. This time, I made a commitment that I am all-in on this and I would be true to myself. I stared at the #5 goal on the list written on a post-it pasted to my wall: To have a Personal Growth of 10X. The only question I had was “How do I even measure this thing?”

The simplest solution was to Google it.

But this time, even Google was baffled. You would find articles that were qualitative like track your progress, do journalling, measure your emotional well-being. But, nothing quantifiable. In my search, I came to a conclusion that:

Personal Growth is so highly personal in the way that only you can define how much you have grown and it is difficult for any single metrics to measure your success. It was easy to measure things like income growth: 10X from 40k a year to 400k a year. But it was extremely difficult to quantify you today and you 1 year from now if you have grown 10X.

I was not satisfied with the outcome of this search as I had mentioned earlier, I am highly committed to achieving this goal. How do I achieve something that I cannot measure? I paced around my house for 20 mins to think of a solution. Eventually, I thought of a process that would logically measure my growth and at the same time be fairly easy for me to track it periodically. I constructed the process in this manner:

1. Thinking about me today and me 10X tomorrow. How do I get from me today to me 10X?
2. Listing down all the things that I need for this evolution to happen.
3. Making my list measurable and breaking them into milestones
4. Prioritise weightage and summing up all my efforts as a final score of my Personal Growth this year

Photo by Laurenz Kleinheider on Unsplash

1. Thinking about me today and me 10X tomorrow. How do I get from me today to me 10X?

If I had achieved all my goals in 1 year’s time, how would I look like? Which level would I be working at? How productive would I be? How would I be spending my time? What would the quality of my thoughts be? What would I have learnt?

I was very specific and detailed in the design of me in 1 year’s time because I knew that this was my clutch year. I either make it or I die. It was a binary function. Once I gained clarity of who I was going to be, I knew I can do it.

2. Listing down all the things that I need to make this evolution happen.

• I knew that I needed to be fully accountable to every part of my life. To be accountable, it meant that all my work, effort, play and time were measured and reviewed by myself so that I do not waste any of my resources.
• I knew that my personal growth would also be in sync with my Business progress, not monetarily but in terms of the softer aspects. For example, it does not matter how much money Magic Box makes from trading but it matters how consistent I am and how I steer it to achieve the milestones I set. For Wanderhow wise, it would tie in with my abilities to deliver results on its growth.
• I would achieve my personal learning goal and successfully hack my smart home project.
• I would read an absurd amount of books. Knowledge is the new capital in this era. The best way to accumulate knowledge was to read extensively.
• I would be a giver instead of a taker.
• I would write in both higher quality and quantity that I had ever achieved.
• I would make insanely great decisions. I would also record them so that I could track my decision-making abilities and improve on them.
• I would follow 52 weeks of Momentum content like a bible.
• I would not be facing the same problems that I faced before in my life.
• I would eradicate all my destructive behaviours that had stopped me from achieving my potential.
• I would be religiously journalling throughout my entire journey.
• I would have a mentor. A mentor whom I respect and was willing to help me achieve success.

After I came up with this full list, I had an honest conversation with my subconscious. Say that I had really achieved everything on this list, I would not had grown just 10X but 100X instead! I got excited at the thought of growing that much and I revised my goal: To have a Personal Growth of 100X.

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

3. Making my list measurable and breaking them into milestones

1. Accountability for 66 days, 120 days, 200 days, 270 days, 365 days(I broke the time of a year to 5 milestones to be achieved. The first is 66 days because scientific research shows that you need 66 days to build a habit). I would fill this sheet every single day to be accountable to myself.
2. Wanderhow would have 100 users, 250 users, 500 users, 750 users and 1000 users. (My 2018 goal for Wanderhow was to reach 1000 users)
3. Magic Box would achieve consistent results for 6 months. Then I would develop it as a side business aiming to generate an income of 2k a month
4. Hacking my Smart Home, I broke it down into 4 phases: Phase 1, Google Home + Chatbot. Phase 2, Facial Recognition. Phase 3: Music, Lights, Wifi. Phase 4: Voice control app. I broke it into 4 so that I could keep track of the milestones that I had to achieve every 3 months.
5. Reading 12 books, 20 books, 30 books, 40 books, 52 books this year. I usually read 12 books in a normal year, on the year that I set a reading goal, I read 20 books. So setting these high targets really excites me.
6. To be a Giver, impacting 2 person, 4 person, 6 person, 8 person and 10 persons’ lives. My life’s recurring theme was to help others. I would measure my success by the number of people I helped.
7. Writing 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 pieces of article. It could be for my business or my blog on Medium. Writing is a great form of clearing my mind’s clutter.
8. Making better decisions. After I finished Principles by Ray Dalio, I was very inspired by the way he approached Decision Making. I made a simple framework from his words combined with my personal experience. My milestones were to record 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 instances of me making a decision with this model.
9. To be committed to following 52 weeks of Momentum and submitting the assignments on time. I knew that if I were to follow 52WM, I would achieve my any goal that I set. The hard part is continue going at it when it gets tough.
10. Am I still facing the same problems that I faced in 2017? Yes/ No
11. Staying out of Destructive Behaviours for 2018? Success/ Failure
12. Did I find a mentor? Yes/ No

4. Prioritise weightage and summing up all my efforts as a final score for my Personal Growth this year.

Not every factors were of the same importance. For example, being accountable was my keystone habit that hold together other parts of my life. Comparing it to writing, writing only impacted a smaller part of life. Therefore I rated being accountable as high and writing as low. You must customise your own weightage.

I scrutinised my list and came up with 3 factors that were high priority and 4 factors that were medium priority:

Summing up all the units of effort, it added up to 25 units. Next, let us assign every milestone with 1% of accomplishment towards 100X growth. We end up with a potential growth of 125% which I would loosely approximate it to 125X of Personal Growth.

“But this so totally just your guess-timation”. Yes, it was 100% my guess-timation but let’s put this into perspective:

• If I were to read 52 books in a year, could I equate that to 5X of personal growth?
• If I were to write 70 articles in a year, could I equate that to 5X of personal growth?
• If I had followed Benjamin Hardy’s 52 weeks of momentum wholeheartedly, would I have grown by 20X?

If all your answers were YES! which mine were, then this guess-timation would work.

Personal Growth as a Compounding Function

The most beautiful thing about accomplishing everything on our list was that all these growth compounds on each other.

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If you read 52 books and wrote 70 articles, the relationship between the two would be a multiplication function. As you read more, your writing would improve. As you wrote more, you get better insights when you read because you are able to clear through the clutter to understand the author. Now let’s add Business and Making Better Decisions into the picture, all these milestones would serve to improve each other and form into a powerful growth compounding function.

To say that I would accomplish a growth of 100X if I managed to finish everything on my list would actually be an understatement. I probably had grown by much much much more.

Conclusion

After finishing the 1st draft of this 2000-words article, I was questioning myself why I wrote it. Self-development was not my strength nor a genre that I want to be good in. I wanted to tell stories that can move people and inspire them. That’s the reason why I included more of myself, my downfall and my climb in my final submission.

Hope you like it. If you do, do subscribe to my account so that you can be the judge of whether I grew 100X =p

Do also checkout my startup @ wanderhow

(Special thanks to Kunal Shandilya for his feedback on my 1st draft.)