The holidays are here and mark the end of another year. I find myself naturally in a reflective mood and so today I’ll share what I’ve been thinking about.
if you're reading this it's too late
As you read this, students are putting the finishing touches on their recommendations for our Sprint Challenge. They are down to their final ~30 hours to finish their decks. Their time for procrastinating is over! Teams are sending them off tomorrow to be reviewed by executives at one of the three partner companies.
I've been doing my best to provide teams with daily feedback and guidance that maximizes their opportunity to make an impact. Thankfully this is what I spent the last 6 years at Versett doing. I've been able to share some things I've learned, point them to resources I've found valuable, and even bring in some past colleagues to give students feedback!
Over the past few weeks, I've found myself learning as well as I try to balance providing direction as well as space for people to figure it out on their own. Where I've come to more recently is structure is not a bad thing. When you're doing something new (and daunting) like this for the first time, it's valuable to have guardrails and early guidance. They need models to emulate and an initial direction. If you lean too heavily into a figure-it-out mentality, it ends up being unproductive. Students waste time figuring out the wrong things and not really growing. Give them frameworks and structure, but push them on how they operate within them.
In my mind, here's what the balance looks like.
Too FIO: This executive summary is no good, make it better.1
Too prescriptive: Rewrite the opening sentence to say this and add these 2 data points.
Just right: Executives expect the summary to be concise and compelling. Right now, it's too vague. How can we make it more specific and compelling?
We have another Challenge early next year where I'll continue to iterate and refine my own coaching approach. Sessions take a different format during the challenge so there is less for me to talk about with those. Instead, I want to spend time talking about personal growth and feedback loops.
Pursuing hypergrowth
On Sunday I attended a monthly planning session with the folks at Ultraworking that reinvigorated me. We debriefed the month of November and made a plan of priorities and changes necessary for December to hit any goals we have. It reminded me of a key to personal growth: intention. It always starts with intention. We don't accidentally stumble into miraculous growth. It's not that we can't grow without it, but if we want to flourish, we need intention.
No, this is not an ad for Ultraworking 😆2. I think they do a lot of interesting things and I’ve been trying to be more intentional with my own time lately as I continue to iterate on my working schedule and priorities. Their systems have been helpful in that pursuit.
As I reflected more, I realized there are specific ingredients for personal growth. Here are a few that I find are important:
Accountability → You need a group or mechanisms to keep you on track. This can come in the form of mandatory check-ins with someone like a personal trainer or having a group of friends who are also pursuing growth that you meet with. You want someone to hold you accountable and ideally there is some consequence to it.
Intention → You want to set objectives ahead of time and be deliberate about how you spend your time. It's not that we shouldn't take breaks or pursue serendipity, but if we want to achieve growth in a specific direction, it requires intention. Sebastian Marshall, a cofounder of Ultraworking, talks about his perfect week and how he had no "bad time". Right off the bat let's address the fact that this is extreme and not what I'm advocating for. Instead, I suggest we move closer to it by planning areas of our life that matter most to us.
Reflection → I encourage you to reflect and get feedback on what you're doing. The more feedback loops you're able to get, the better. More feedback = More growth. It's as simple as that. Tighter feedback loops lead to faster change. This is the realm of annual reviews, daily updates, and everything in between. Each of these steps adds a level of reflection to your life. To shorten our feedback loops, ask yourself how you can take a monthly cadence and make it weekly. What about daily? Hourly? Ultraworking has taken this to an extreme with their work cycles. In a 4-hour working session, they've built in moments of reflection to readjust and improve your own approach.
Ambition → We are almost always too safe with our goals. We set them so we can achieve them, not so we can grow. Goals are meant to stretch us, they often set the ceiling of our ambition. To me, goals are meant to be scary. Our abilities are far more malleable than we think, and by pursuing things slightly out of reach, we can see how capable we are of growth.
Holism → I don't believe in the total pursuit of productivity or work. We are human after all. What are your creative ambitions? Physical? Mental? Relationships? Growth comes in many forms, but the systems we use to achieve them often look the same. Apply the same rigor to your workout regimen and relationship building as you do to work or productivity and you'll have better results all around.
Systems → It's not enough to just reflect and say oh yeah that didn't go well. You must also reflect those changes in your own life. This is where a system comes in, whatever that means to you. Don't leave your growth to chance. What changes are you going to make as a result of your reflection?
Here's what this might look like for you:
Reflection: how did yesterday go? what do you want to do differently today? Put this into a system like your calendar or set up a meeting with someone so it's more likely to happen.
Start the day by setting some intentions. You can even do this the night before. what do you want to do? what do you not want to do? what does a good day look like? a bad day? Send it to someone for some accountability.
Repeat this on a smaller scale for your working sessions of 1-2 hours. what do you want to get done? check-in every 30 minutes. are you on track? what needs to change?
Repeat this on a bigger scale with weekly and monthly planning. what are your goals for this time period? are they ambitious enough? are they holistic and covering your full life?
Achieving escape velocity
If you're in TKS the above might start to look familiar. At TKS, we have an optional program called Velocity. It's structured in a similar way to the above with weekly meetings, accountability partners, and ambitious goals. I had my own click moment last week as we went through some additional training: Velocity is not about having TKS as your priority; it's about making your own growth a priority. For most people, this ends up looking like setting TKS as a priority because of how we've structured the program. It’s designed to accelerate your growth. I might write more about it in the future, but for now what you need to know is:
it’s an opt-in program designed to further accelerate your growth.
you’re held to very high standards that align with how we believe you can grow.
you have a small group of people (3-5) who you meet with once a week and keep each other accountable.
you set ambitious goals and you hit them.
There’s more to it but it’s almost secondary. What’s interesting to me right now is considering what is my personal velocity. What systems have I designed for my own personal growth?
Right now I'm still trying to create my own accountability group; I’ve been trying to do this on my own to date. If you're interested in your own growth, hit me up. If you’re thinking about your own personal growth, consider the following:
Who are the people that hold you accountable?
What goals are you pursuing?
Most importantly, how do you know you're growing?
Let’s reflect for a second.
How many students do you know who are this intentional about their life?
How many PEOPLE do you know who are this intentional about their life?
This is something that excites me about TKS. If we can help more people give this much attention to their lives, think about how much better they will be.
✌🏼
I don't know who would do it this way but I needed an example lol
I've been an on-again-off-again customer for the last several years as I've entered periods that required more deep work.