Exponential Growth
I want growth fast and exponential growth is the fastest way to get there. Many things in nature follow an exponential curve so it is realistic to achieve. It means giving up on immediate results, short-sighted thinking, and sacrificing things that are distractions or diversions. Being consistent and spending maximum time on what I want is the fastest way to get there. The benefits are only obvious on a longer time scale so there needs to be an effort, pain, and cost incurred to get there.
I don’t believe there is a universal balance for every person so things tend to get imbalanced and that is all right. The first step is to stop comparing to others and detach. It is important to keep my eyes open about what is going on, detachment is not an excuse to minimize the information I receive.
Most people are bad at visualizing things exponentially. I often predict and do things on a linear scale by default when I have a shallow understanding of myself and certain things. I simply look at the numbers in my life, big milestones achieved to get an idea of whether things are happening before time or not to get an idea of how good I am at visualizing.
The biggest challenge here is a lack of a long-term plan that does not get affected by external factors.
My first step towards doing something big in life is to identify a purpose for life specific to me. I have had a big purpose for the last 2 decades that has not changed and it is nowhere close to being accomplished for the next 2 decades either, something that makes life perfect if it happens at any cost imaginable and straight out of fiction as long as it is realistically achievable.
The difference between good people and great people is that great people do things with a plan that stacks the dots exponentially. It is like Steve Jobs used to say —
“You have to trust the dots in your life will connect somehow.”
Everything in life has a cost associated with it, whether it is a time cost, a stakeholder cost, or a competitor cost aka the cost of delay.
If I don’t have a plan that I’m telling everyone about I am NOT serious to achieve it, to put it to the test with other plans and improving upon it so that I can move on to the next plan after achieving the current one. Then it is wishful thinking that I resort to whenever I need an excuse for why I’m doing what I’m doing when I have felt low or lost.
Planning 101 — Time cost
Planning is essential to get things done and to save time. The biggest effort comes in the planning stage itself even though the execution takes longer.
Whether I like it or not time passes by and things change towards hard times or don’t change towards the objective as much as I want in the absence of planning. So the first step is to always have a time-bound planning session where I pen down things on paper after checking with someone else.
It doesn’t have to be perfect or absolute, it needs to be perfect for how I am right now with the information that I am aware of. I am always terrible when I do things for the first time but I accumulate information on the topic and revise my plan and timelines often.
Then the execution of the plan involves a lot of hard work in a flow where time passes quickly while I am having fun doing the things and paying attention to the details for the feedback loop so that I can relay it to the correct person.
I will not plan the timelines by looking at other people who were in a similar position as me in the past and how much time they took to get the things done because things were different back then. I can use the statistics of other people who faced the same struggle by talking with them, but I will be setting highly optimistic timelines compared to them which are realistic timelines according to how long I feel the things will take.
Here is an example of a feedback loop from Machine learning, I can gather feedback from nature as well and others who are experts in their field of interest. I will discuss feedback later as well since it is very important
Stakeholder cost
I am a stakeholder of the country I am in, the currency I use, the city or town I am in currently as well as where and with whom I spent my time in childhood, college or at work.
Good planning takes into consideration a long term strategy in alignment with other like-minded people where tactics and battles can be won or lost, critical path evaluation is done and I identify where I am going to spend my time building my stakes and why, whether it is a certification for a skill, a business, a company, an industry, a website, anything in a flexible way where I can reevaluate things on a timely manner to account for disruptions.
Good ways to identify stakeholders are through demographic research, talking to people to gather facts, numbers, doing calculations, and traveling to be on the ground.
Becoming an active stakeholder is important to generate wealth. For example, buying a house makes me a stakeholder in real estate and the neighborhood. If I had 52 houses in various cities and localities, I would be a bigger stakeholder in real estate. That means I need to look out for things like cyclones, natural disasters, climate change. I need to be in touch with even bigger stakeholders in real estate and the long tail of thousands of house owners who own 1 or 2 houses for alignment and information on relevant laws, situations, and trends going on.
The fastest way to grow is to buy as many assets as possible to become an active stakeholder in many things and to increase my ownership over time, even those assets that oppose each other because that puts me in the unique situation of being unbiased once again.
The same applies to any situation, one of which is citizenship. For example, if I was in touch with my older generations who were in the same country for many generations I would have a higher stakeholder cost towards the country than someone who immigrated recently. This is why if I have to move to another country I incur significant stakeholder costs in immigration and taxes, which are necessary friction but I have to be doing really well in life to be able to manage these easily. New laws have been in the news about strictly enforcing immigration laws in the Trump presidency relating to immigration, and the same is visible in India around the CAA-NRC
This goes to show that it is not a minor matter to move alliances and sell ownership or stake in something, which is the key difference between the illiquidity and permanence of stakes vs shares or stocks that are traded. This means stakeholders are not easily swayed by words and they don’t have “paper-hands”. To get the stakeholders with me, I need to do what they say to get aligned with them or I need significant capital to show that I need something important done or a strong purpose or reason.
The way to focus on growth and avoid distractions and diversions is to take away or sacrifice the option to sell or liquidate stakes, committing to its growth, committing time, money, and putting many negative repercussions on giving up. In short, a Do or Die attitude — towards getting it done, taking responsibility and care of it, and not just maintaining it, making it Antifragile.
It is better for me to fail fast, accept quickly, put the ego aside, and make calls, seek expert advice and listen to the experts, implement the things and get it done.
Here is an example explaining the Antifragility that a paradigm shift brings with willpower, work, facts, positivity, and value triumphing over opinions, negativity, short-term thinking, instant gratification, and wrong timing of decisions due to groupthink or mindset, no alignment with stakeholders.
Strongest ownership <- Proprietor/Owner <- Partner(Stakes <- Shares <- Stocks) <- No Ownership
The safest, simplest, positive, and most surefire way of becoming rich is to find something I love and dedicate to stand with throughout my life along with all the ups and downs and show strong ownership in it for many decades which defines my character and shows my expertise in an area. Rich here refers to wealth which is leagues apart from money.
I find something I love simply because I love it, even though I do not understand it, I don’t find a reason to love it, nor do I go into depth about it, neither will I relate it to something in my past or future. It is simply unconditional eternal love for doing something. That is what survives the test of time. From a meta-ethical moral relativism standpoint, I cannot go wrong here.
Cost of delay
The execution of the plan needs to be swift. I usually spend a good amount of time observing things to get a good sense of what is the baseline and expected behaviors to track my growth. I might have things that I don’t enjoy doing along the way that might cause a delay but it is always necessary to do the things I don’t like because that will give me the edge I need to be at the top. Being at the top is very important as it pays and pays and pays to be at the top.
The growth environment does not allow for a situation where a delay is acceptable in the harshest possible way.
Every delay in execution leads to a big price to be paid. There is an imaginary leaderboard where I fall behind on points when I am slacking. The only competition needs to be with the best version of myself which is always an opponent that always wins and is always at the top, which can not be tied to or defeated as he pulls away every few minutes at an exponential pace by being in touch with more people, having access to more information and through skill.
Every year new companies spend a lot of time, money, and resources solving problems, creating systems and processes which are cutting edge. Blitzscaling is a good way to move fast. Time erodes everything including systems, processes, and companies because they are all man-made. How long till something new and better defeats the current best.
If I am not at the forefront of building something that will change things in the current year anywhere on the planet, then it means I will be left by miles and miles of distance, outdated and living in the past, becoming obscure and on a path to serving those better than me.
The important thing to understand about the cost of delay is that there are two things associated with it that I will discuss here — Negativity and Positivity
When I do Time Analysis, I look at many optimistic, pessimistic, realistic, critical paths and other ways of getting a sense of how long something takes.
Negativity helps me to understand the problems. The higher the negativity I can face, the deeper I can go into understanding the problem. I mention negativity first not because it is more important to be negative; in fact, it is harder and more important to be positive; but simply because it is sequentially the first step to understand the problem before starting on the solution.
Positivity is about how well the solution will perform on the problem, which is a direct reflection of how well I understood and defined the problem and all the moving parts, as well as how well I can formulate solutions to the problems. There is no well-defined problem in the world without a solution. Positivity is also very important to get the things done before time and how proactive I am to get ahead of things and fix them which takes a lot of effort which I might not have put in if I didn’t have a strong sense of “It needs to happen”. The mindset is very important to get things done.
Comfort is the enemy of growth
I can either be comfortable or I can grow as a person. Both do not go hand in hand. Being uncomfortable eventually always leads to growth. I have spent many years working hard and yet being comfortable. Working hard does not mean I am not in my comfort zone. Laziness is different than comfort.
The comfort begins when I go on autopilot and on a predictable path, where any person who knows me for a while knows how I will respond in a given situation at a particular point in time. Such a situation can be defined as my “mindset”, aka a set of strong notions or opinions that I carry that I believe to be true because of a limited personal circle and worldview or philosophy of life. The Mindset is also closely associated with “groupthink” or my inability to think factually and simply use whatever information I receive from other sources without thoroughly checking each and every credible source, and assuming it to be correct in my perspective.
Now that I understand what Mindset means I can tune it towards growth.
Some things are not very obvious to me because I like to think I am unique and perfect like a snowflake. But they are very obvious to others and I cannot take everybody’s advice on how to do things, because the information gathered does not achieve a consensus or necessarily consist of accurate information.
To achieve growth the first step is to always ask an honest person much better than myself and accept the answer with an open mind no matter how painful it is. Honesty here is about getting more people from different backgrounds to look at things they are experts in and to gather insights.
Honesty here is not about pursuing an absolute concise truth that attempts to satisfy different people coming from different perspectives and mindsets. Absolute truth is often involving a lot of technicalities the more perspectives and people I try to incorporate and explain it to, with varying skills and hardly any in-depth understanding of the topic at hand. There is no shortcut to understanding something quickly in a concise way with a simple magical line or sound that will make hundreds of people go Yes!!! and not rethink it later. Efforts are always involved both to explain and to understand and investing that kind of time is wasteful unless there is a clear reason to be doing it instead of working. The key point is getting work done now precedes lengthy explanations in priority until explaining becomes the work to be done for a strong purpose.
The way forward is always Yes and …
No is denial, self-defense mechanism, and thinking I know better which is a form of ego, where people irrespective of age and type of skill protect their identity by rejecting the influence towards a better thought process and mindset which revolves around collaboration.
The most important honesty I have is with myself.
It is not acceptable to lie to myself.
The reason I say this is because communication with others is an art in itself that needs a lot of time and conversations to build. The same thing said to 10 people from different backgrounds might be interpreted by them in 10 different ways if there is no common lingo between us and an information gap. So it is important to have clarity in thoughts despite confusion in another person about my own identity and facts irrespective of the clarity in others. This corrects for bad habits like being obsequious, seeing validation.
Denial is hardwired in every human being. It protects me from understanding my own mortality. I keep away from denial and lower tiers of the self-defense mechanism and strive towards humor. New information, changes, and paradigm shifts take time to process and accept.
The honesty of a person in this scenario depends on few factors
- The amount of closeness to the person to be honest to me and informed about my situation. An honest person who doesn’t know me for at least a while is not worth it. The longer they know me the better.
- The person’s honesty or willingness to be rude, not care about others’ opinions, a view that it is ok to criticize the current version of a person because they will not be the same person the next day and by the next year.
- My willingness to not punish or be upset at the honest people around me. At times I am unaware of this and how I distance myself from people by taking things too personally, which is a sign of a weak person, sticking to my beliefs which is the barrier to growth. Nobody wants to help someone with honesty if they are not willing to accept it in the right way and take it forward constructively and are strong. It is not the honest person’s job to give the feedback in a constructive way, that task falls onto me to work on.
The truth is always a bitter pill to swallow
To get out of my comfort zone I need to find something that I hate doing and do it consistently until I love doing it. And then I need to repeat until I do enough things and this process is sure to lead to growth.
I need to stack the things exponentially in my master plan or else I will be working in somebody else’s Master plan which is more often than not the case because I am easily influenceable and that is a good thing to do follow what others say and build the skill of planning slowly with a lot of patience and years of practice.
It is good to specialize which is a form of vertical growth, but horizontal growth is much needed early on to cover all the priorities of life and use cases, and after vertical growth to grow exponentially.
Unless I am putting myself in extreme situations; which is anything outside my comfort zone; and pushing myself to the limit and challenging myself to stretch beyond it, it is not possible to grow exponentially.
The character is tested only when I am in the darkest of days and how I respond to things in that state.
Not even trying to do something irrespective of what it is will become the bigger regret when I look back at how I’m spending and managing my time and I cannot do it alone. Not trying is the easiest way to live an ordinary life.
There are many things I did not get the time to cover here so the article does not scratch the surface of what I needed and did to grow exponentially. I do attempt to make it stay relevant despite the passage of time.
What does it mean to grow?
Is it as simple as looking at my bank balance? Is it about the purchasing power of money? Is it the count or price of things I surround myself with? Is it resource accumulation? Is it the number of people I work with and my relationship with them? Is it power? Is it about being in a position where I can help others in time of need? Is it about leadership and leading others to grow through self-realization? Is it about getting married and having kids? Is it buying a house or a car? Is it about being famous? Is it that job promotion or job switch? Is it about starting my own company? Is it about traveling the world? Is it about owning a lot of assets through investments?
Or is it something else entirely?
Like the growth of perspective? Is it more knowledge and wisdom? Is growth learning to be happy in life all the time? Is it about removing inhibitions and not caring what others think? Is it about listening better? Is it about talking more or being silent? Is it about feeling happy that others are growing and encouraging them to grow, seeking out animosity instead of feeling jealous and indifferent? Is growth about finding a purpose to dedicate life to? Is it about being content and forgiving myself and others? Is it about acquiring new skills? Is it about building character and personality? Is it about exploring new frontiers? Is it about learning to have a healthy lifestyle and meditation? Is it about accumulating wealth? What is the wealth I am looking for in my life? Is it about financial freedom? Is it about getting comfortable with the things that once used to be outside my comfort zone? Is it about pursuing, understanding, and loving to do the things I once used to hate or avoid? Is it about building memory skills and remembering things long forgotten? Is it about not rushing to conclusions when I see something predictable going on and expecting a different outcome despite thousands of failed attempts? Is it about seeing everything with wonder and magic once again like I used to back as a kid? Is it about unlearning bad thought processes picked up and used for a long time? Is it about learning to think like a kid again, being creative, innovative? Is it about accepting that I know very little and being humble? Is it about believing in myself and doing what I set out to do despite what others are doing? Is it about following the process better? Is it about breaking barriers and rules? Is it about trusting others or learning to trust despite betrayals? Is it about adjusting to change faster, adapting and overcoming challenges better? Is it about overcoming fear?
Arriving at the right questions itself is a form of growth
It is clear that growth is about increasing something positive or reducing something negative in life. The list of parameters I use to measure the growth makes a well-defined growth problem tailored to my life. And that will eventually be the blueprint inside my head that will be achieved sooner or later as long as I keep working for it consistently. The last stage to achieving the goals I set is to set new goals, a new blueprint. That helps me to finally achieve and move on from the old goals I set in my life a few years ago to bigger goals.
The more assumptions I make in defining the growth problem for myself, the slower I will grow, if I leave any gaps or ambiguity in my understanding, I will get things that might not be what I truly want. If I do something for the sake of satisfying someone else, my goal achieved will be making someone else happy so it better be someone I value that much or someone who is rather clear in the first place and will be grateful when the goal is achieved. The longer I take to achieve the goal set by someone else, the more likely it is that the victory may not be worth the cost or outdated. It might still honor the wishes of someone that is no more or celebrate their role and show/express gratitude.
Small changes in life compound over time. 1% change a day compounds to 37% improvement over a month. It is difficult to not be regressing but easy to add incremental changes. But mistakes are essential to growth, rejection is a part of life. The point is to keep growing and getting better and better at growing.
Here are some other articles that I liked a lot on exponential growth
