If you’re striving forward and actively working to improve yourself, you already know that refining your skills and perspective doesn’t happen by accident.
When it comes to personal development, people often rely on motivation for momentum. But motivation is like a poorly operated roller coaster. It rarely arrives on time or when you need it, and it lasts only briefly before sputtering out.
Sure, you can lean into motivation if it’s there, but in no way should you seek it out as a way to unlock productivity.
All this is to highlight that only a small proportion of people are able to get ahead on their own volition.
Below is a framework for getting ahead of 99% of people. I’ve developed these frameworks through years of study, strategy, and experimentation.
We’ll begin with defining your vision and nightmare, then move into action, mindset, and how to cement mastery by paying it forward.
Define your ideal and nightmare
Our lives follow the shape of a story.
And every good story has a main character that wants something.
Stories also feature obstacles or bad actors that not only try to prevent that character from reaching goals, but actively work to send them in the opposite direction.
This is a universal framework. It shows up in every book and movie, and applies to each one of us. As the main character in your own story, you can better fulfill your role once you define what you’re aiming for.
You need a vision. An ideal.
Less discussed, too, is the importance of defining your worst nightmare. When you clarify what your own failure would look like, you can better recognize when you’ve fallen off your path.
To set yourself apart, you must give yourself something to run from and toward.
The more specific you can define what you want to do and who you want to be, the more powerful the exercise.
Try to put your vision and nightmare into single sentences:
“I aim to be someone who is [TRAIT] and [TRAIT] while doing [WHAT] for [WHO] in a world where [WHY].”
“I never want to be someone who is [TRAIT] or [TRAIT] while doing [WHAT] for [WHO] because I would fall short of [VISION/IDEAL].“
This will take thinking and reflection, and conversations with those who know you best.
Once you figure out what you want and what you must avoid, then you can reverse-engineer the steps it would take to arrive at each destination.
Action creates character
It’s easy to look at a spry, long-limbed NBA player and think they lucked out on the genetic lottery.
It’s true: You can’t teach height. But the skills necessary to play basketball at the highest level are earned through action and diligence aimed in a specific direction.
Successful people don’t take action because they are “just that type of person.” Rather, taking action is what eventually makes them that type of person. Action is the catalyst to transformation.
Action here means the habits you do consistently over time. What you do everyday determines the strength of your character — not vice versa.
With time, though, you create a virtuous cycle.
Action creates strong character, and that character reinforces your commitment to action.
Define your non-negotiables
Becoming better than who you are currently requires you to force your future into the present. Start practicing the habits that a more successful version of yourself would do, using your vision and nightmare as a guide.
For more than 10 years, I’ve made three habits daily non-negotiables:
- Exercise
- Read
- Journal
Exercise clears my mind, reading fills my mind, and journaling lets me organize my mind.
These questions can help you build your own habits:
- What do your role models do everyday?
- What does your ideal day look like?
- What would you be proud to say you do every single day?
- What small action could you do everyday that would move you closer to your best self?
If you asked the next 100 people you ran into what their non-negotiable habits are, odds are only a couple of them would have an answer.
Intentional, consistent action is how to stand out in a crowd.
Solve your problems in public
As I wrapped up my college science degree, I had a problem.
I didn’t want my job to be the same field as my major, because all I wanted to do was write for a living.
But I wasn’t sure how to get there. So after I graduated, I launched a blog and started writing online.
That was 2018. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the best possible thing I could have done.
Putting my work on the internet raised the stakes compared to writing in private. It forced me to improve. I had no choice but to figure things out as I went, since I had no prior experience creating anything online.
Five years later, I realize I was following a proven formula:
- Define a problem
- Solve it in public via a personal project
I developed skills in real time, and I illustrated my progress with every single blog post.
In my writing, I was candid about being young and inexperienced, but that piece of me gradually shrank as my knowledge increased.
Plus, along the way I collected complementary skills like graphic design, email marketing, website building, and social media strategy.
Each of these standalone skills provide upside, but stacked together they become even more valuable.
Meanwhile, I developed an audience online through the consistency and transparency of my work. I never tried to be funny or creative or unique, but my individuality emerged because I publicly spoke about what I was doing and learning, and where I was attempting to go.
It’s worth noting too, that with society more online than ever before, those who build something in public become more attractive candidates for jobs, relationships, and even school applications.
Achieve expertise through others
The above formula doesn’t stop with the personal project.
Ideally, this leads to paying it forward through teaching others what you’ve learned, which is the best way to cement expertise and mastery.
Following through to this final step is your value-add to the world around you. What are skills and knowledge good for anyway, if not to pave the way for others?
Personal development may sound like a selfish endeavor, but at its best it is something that uplifts communities through education and work.
Using your own failures and projects as a guide, you can teach others how to create similar outcomes. This can look like one-on-one coaching, tutoring, or building online courses.
And again, teaching something only reinforces the knowledge and skills in your own life.
Here’s the formula again:
- Define a problem
- Solve it in public via a personal project
- Pay it forward via teaching
Put it all together
Remember, this entire framework is based on your vision, split into your ideal and nightmare.
These provide the foundation for your habits and non-negotiables, and give you a direction to orient yourself in. Adopting the mindset of your role models (or future self) starts first with behaving like they would.
Next comes solving your own problems in public via a personal project.
That’s how you build your skills, stay accountable, and develop adjacent skills to stack on top of one another. Doing so also makes you a more noticeable, marketable, and attractive candidate across social and professional markets.
(Read about how to build an audience online here.)
Finally, you pay it forward through teaching and coaching others who are following the same journey as you.
This cements your own learning, establishes you as an expert in a niche, and allows you to pay it forward and uplift your community — all of which put you ahead of 99% of people.
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