Applying Exponential Principles to Personal Growth
March 14, 2008
I recently had an opportunity to listen in as our CEO, John Bostick, spoke to and fielded questions from Xavier Professor Tim Kloppenborg’s project management class. John captures an audience’s attention with his wisdom and propensity for great story telling. And he’s not afraid to share the hard lessons of his experience founding and running multiple multi-million-dollar businesses. This talk, although about project management and the trade offs of time, scope, and budget, hit so many inherently valuable life principles.
John reads voraciously. I’ve known this. Over my four years at LUCRUM I’ve listened to John apply lessons to his life and our business taken from content that he’s read and shared with us. Today I found the source of his motivation.
John described a very simple principle that he called the principle of exponents. I’m not sure that’s the clearest title, but the concept became as clear as day as he explained it. In essence, the principle is that if you spend 15 minutes each day improving yourself you will become exponentially stronger in character, will, knowledge, and understanding than the average person over time. Not that your goal is to be better than the next guy, but to become a generally stronger person with more to give.
John broke it down like this. If the average person can read, say, a bit less than a page a minute, then in 15 minutes that person can read about 12 pages. If the average book is about 350 pages long, then a person can read about a book a month. That is 12 books a year. Read three books purely for entertainment purposes (because all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy). Read three personal growth books, like Covey’s 7 Habits, or Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. And then read 6 books about the business and profession you’ve built your career on. 12 books a year, every year, and you will have come a long, long way in a relatively short amount of time.
Then John graphed the principle on the chalkboard, and it looked something like this:
At point 1, both person A and person B graduate from college and enter the workforce. The graphs measure personal growth over time as the two people apply growth principles and life lessons learned. Person A out of the gate begins reading about his business and profession, networking into relationships that will help forward his career, takes entrepreneurial chances and learns some great lessons. Person B doesn’t.
Clearly, with the passage of time, person A experiences personal growth at a rate that far exceeds person B. 10 or 15 years down the line we might look at person A (point 2) and talk about how lucky that person has been in his life and career because we’re looking at a point in time. If we look at history, though, person A established a pattern on day-1 that guaranteed the trajectory of personal growth if it didn’t all but guarantee personal success.
And all that from just 15 minutes a day.
Tell us: how much do you read? How do you apply habits to guarantee personal growth? We’d love to hear about them.
- Andy
Comments
2 Responses to “Applying Exponential Principles to Personal Growth”
Got something to say?
Polls
Loading ...
[...] And finally a shameless plug for my writing on applying exponential principles to personal growth. [...]
[...] Finally, a shameless plug on my post about behavior patterns that propel personal growth. [...]