Was the David from a month ago laughably stupid?
I’m a big fan of self-deprecating humor, but this isn’t one of those moments. Rather it’s a learning moment. While the above question is a lagging indicator for personal growth, it nevertheless deserves to be measured. After all, as the great Peter Drucker would say, you cannot manage what you cannot measure.
The timeframe of evaluation
Why a month? Why not a week? Or not a year?
In the business world, there’s a concept called the rule of 72. Effectively, 72 divided by the growth rate is the time it takes to double. For instance, if you’re growing 30% month-over-month, 72 divided by 30 is 2.4. So, if you’re growing revenue at 30% every month, you’re going to double your revenue in roughly two and a half months.
It is equally as analogous for personal growth.
time it takes to shock yourself = 72 / rate of learning
Let’s say you’re a first-time founder, and you only knew 10 things about how to start a business. But every day, you learn one more thing – via podcasts, articles, blogs, classes, you name it. Give or take a 10% growth rate. You will double your knowledge in about a week. Hopefully enough to shock the you from a week prior. Or take another example, many self-help books ask you to commit to getting 1% better every day. Assuming you consistently do that, you would have doubled your experience in about 2.5 months.
That goes to say, the faster you want to grow, the shorter the timeframe should be for you to look back and reflect on your “stupidity.” For me, it is in my nature to be hungry for knowledge, and I really love learning about things I thought I knew and what I didn’t know. For now, as learning is a top priority for me, a month sounds like a reasonable timeframe to shock myself. I also use the term “stupidity” lightly and with notes of self-deprecating love.
The shock factor
But how do you measure personal growth? Something rather intangible. It isn’t a number like revenue or user acquisition. Some people might have a set of resolutions or goals that is tangible and quantitative – say read two books a month or exercise an hour four days a week. Great goals, but they are often based on the assumption that movement is progress. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but neither are they synonymous. The former – movement – lacks retrospection.
There were, are, and will be days, weeks, and months, we may just be busy. Our schedule is packed. We’re a duck paddling furiously underwater. And we’re gasping for air. And while our body and mind are exhausted, our body and mind have not expanded. I know I’m not alone when I think to myself, “Wow, I did a lot, but I still feel like I’m not moving anywhere.”
Our brains are unfortunately also poor predictors of the future. We use past progress as indicators of future progress. But while history often rhymes, it does not repeat. Our predictions end up being guesstimates at best.
So I look into the past. I measure my own personal growth emotionally – by shock, very similar to how Tim Urban measures progress of the human race (which I included at the end of a previous essay). I don’t know what the future will hold and neither will I make many predictions of what the future will hold for me. If I knew, I’d have made a fortune on the stock market already, in startups, or on crypto already. What I can commit to is my relentless pursuit of taking risks, making mistakes, and trying things that scare the bejesus out of me. Since only by making new mistakes will I grow as a person. What I am equipped with now can be mapped out by the scar tissue I’ve accumulated.
Coming full circle, what’ll make me realize and appreciate my mistakes and failures more is knowing that as a greenhorn I was laughably stupid.
But if, in retrospect, David from a month ago sounds like quite the sensible person, my growth will have gone from exponential to linear. Or worse, flatlined.
For founders
And now that I’m thinking aloud – or rather, writing aloud (which may deserve its indictment into the #unfiltered series), this might be a great line of questions to ask founders as well.
As a founder, what was the last dumb thing you did? When was that?
And before that, what was the second most recent dumb thing you did?
And the third most recent?
There’s the commonly repeated saying in the venture world. Investors invest in lines, not dots. Two’s a line. Three’s a curve. I want to see how fast you’ve been growing and learning.
Why such a question?
- If we’re in it for the long run, I wanna assess how candid and self-aware you are. Pitch meetings often depict a portrait of perfection. But founders, like all humans, aren’t perfect. For that matter, neither are investors.
- Venture capital is impatient capital. We demand aggressive timelines, and honestly, quite toxic to most people in the world. Given that, if you’re going to learn how to hustle after investors invest, you’re going to have a tough time convincing investors. But if the hustle is already in your DNA, that bias to action lends much better to the venture model.
Photo by Peter Lloyd on Unsplash
Thank you to V. who inspired this blogpost.
The DGQ series is a series dedicated to my process of question discovery and execution. When curiosity is the why, DGQ is the how. It’s an inside scoop of what goes on in my noggin’. My hope is that it offers some illumination to you, my readers, so you can tackle the world and build relationships with my best tools at your disposal. It also happens to stand for damn good questions, or dumb and garbled questions. I’ll let you decide which it falls under.
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