5 min. read | Last Updated 5/8/21
<aside> π’ tl;dr β Struggles, Insight, and Progress are the three focal things that lead to growth in public.
In this notion article, I talk about
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Growth is a lifelong process that focuses on the journey of different experiences as opposed to a destination.
Throughout the past two years, I've realized my desire to optimize my life for growth. Why? - Growth allows me to keep growing beyond any goal or benchmark I set for myself. There are no limits on my growth potential, no one telling me I can stop growing after a certain point.
Growth in private is fun. You have the opportunity to see your results on a project the first time, iterate, get feedback, and then see results the second time, etc. It's a measurement that you make but I always thought growth in private was so limited. I found that growth in private is limiting because you have less people to share the experiences with. First project, fails. The succeeding project also fails. No one knows but you and since the world isn't aware of your failures, you're more likely to make excuses for yourself on why things didn't go right. You're more likely to set up more blockers to avoid getting stuff done and eventually you will lose interest and move on to a new project where the cycle will begin again.
After realizing this, I started thinking about what I could do to start letting people in the world know what I was up too and start becoming apart of my journey. Tons of startup and major companies build in public. They'll launch a project or venture and share their progress through social media, press releases, television commercials, and other forms of media. My thought was, if companies can build in public, why can't I grow in public?
This hyper-thought came to me about a month ago (April 2020) when I had completed my consulting project for the United Nations. There were so many great conversations I had with NGO's, so many thoughts about how to progress with the initiatives in the project, and other ways to promote the work. I didn't think anyone really cared about all my takeaways, the growth, etc but I decided to post on LinkedIn to pilot my growing in public journey to see what the reaction was + how I could formulate better posts.
My audience loved the takeaways and after the release of the first post I went into experimentation mode. My hypothesis was that If I could stay consistent with daily/weekly posts on multiple platforms then I could drive meta engagement to my profiles and start gaining more buy-in from the people around me. I was a stock. I needed people to invest in my growth in order for me to thrive and keep rising. The only way to do that was too go public.
As my LinkedIn momentum continued I took my curious mind over to Twitter and started posting all the unconventional thoughts I had in my head. The intention behind using twitter was simply the fact that it allowed me to take complex thoughts that I had and synthesize them into 140 characters. I've never been good at staying conscice in my portrayal of information but Twitter showed m the value of eliminating unnecessary words and punctuation to portray a thought as simply as possible. In fact, I typed this entire post in Twitter and pasted it here. My intention? - Training for conciseness everyday.
Anyway, my first twitter post was about my moonshot project, Durata, and after the first thread I fell in love with twitter + continued to post about everything that was on my mind.
Growth in public is more than simply showing the world my thoughts, insight, etc. It's about sharing my struggles, insight, and progress. I struggle with different tasks but I make progress despite those struggles. If the world doesn't know that then my content becomes inauthentic and invaluable. Below, I've defied these three characteristics and why they're important for building in public.
Struggles β This is a π point of relatability. Relatable content is interacted with at a much higher rate than content that isn't relatable. We're humans. We're drawn in my things we see a value prop in and if it isn't explicit then we aren't going to buy-in. Struggles are also a way for me to show my audience the different processes I have in place to overcome them. An example is my book, where I was struggling with understanding the value of history courses. I started talking to students from Toronto and California and was able to post about it as well.
Insight β What did you learn. Life is a big bowl that's full of wisdom cereal. Everyone has a spoon in their hand, waiting for the right moment to scoop a cheerio out and take a bite. I think insight is the most important part of the equation because it's all about the reflection and learning. This is where true growth happens + it allows you to prepare for other projects that have a similar framework. Insight is a value starter for people and if you can provide them value by allowing them to see what you learned, then you've got followers + people that want to buy-in to your journey. More π's.
Progress β Forward, forward, forward. Any form of progress matters. Writing one small tweet or an article that details your process. It doesn't matter the medium but showing progress allows people to be happy for you + that happiness turns into serendipity which can unlock doors for you that wouldn't have been available if you had stayed in private and only grown there. Progress is a catalyst for opportunity and this is where you will get the most buy-in. We naturally want to celebrate others and elevate people so the more we share the π results of our projects, the better.