Tag: self-development

A Guide to Scaling Yourself

How to keep your head above water

I was having lunch with a friend today, and we were discussing how does someone know when a person is scaling or not. Who will scale as the company grow and what stops someone from scaling further?

Some companies have early members scaling beautifully as the organization grows, while some don’t. A lot of smooth scaling happens typically when the company is growing organically and the growth rate is relatively modest (< 50% YoY). When a company is growing > 50% YoY, and in some cases, doubling or more, it becomes incredibly difficult for people to keep up with the scale of the company, as humans grow linearly, yet companies grow exponentially.

Below are a few questions to ask yourself to check if you are scaling with the growth needed and some tips and strategies to continue on the fast growth trajectory.

1. Am I “going horizontal?”

I came across the concept of “Going Horizontal” during 10xCEO program and we discussed extensively on how to make sure the executive team is continuing to scale at the right capacity level for the growth needs of the company.

The team internally might already be “over capacity” if the company’s growth rate is modest and the team is experienced. But if the needs for the leadership capacity emerging from growth out weigh the current capacity, then it will hurt the growth rate and the potential upside of the company as long as the leadership team is not fully built to handle the needs.

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The Art of Setting Personal Annual Goals

People tend to be a bit skeptical about setting a personal annual goal. Plans often don’t align with your reality and we’ve all experienced the frustration of setting a goal and giving up a few months into the year, unintentionally hurting your self-esteem.

But, if we don’t have a goal and a plan, we don’t really know whether we are headed in the right direction nor whether we’re making a progress towards a goal or not.

I deeply believe one of the core purpose of personal goal setting is not only to achieve them, but to build up your confidence and increase your self-esteem.

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The Zone of Sustainable Commitment

I was first recommended the book “Leadership and Self-Deception” from Stewart Butterfield during Y Combinator Growth program late last year. I finally got the chance to open the book recently and the story resonated so much that I recommended this book to our entire company.

A high-level summary might go like this: if you get into self-betrayal, you go “in the box” where your perspective of the world starts to distort in your favor. By self-justifying, you find ways to blame others, while inflating your own virtue.

The result is making your relationship worse and inviting others into the box along the way, starting a vicious cycle. Below diagram shows the inside of Bud’s mind, one of the characters in the book. Bud’s baby son David wakes up in the middle of night. The diagram shows what goes through Bud’s mind as he thinks about whether to get up and tend to David or not, while his wife Nancy is asleep besides him.

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Accelerating Self-growth

Ericsson’s work on deliberate practice has a meaningful implication on self-development. Becoming great at something takes more than mere hours spent on the task itself. Based on the work by Dr. Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory, intrapersonal intelligence helps with structuring one’s own deliberate practice programs.

Looking back at my pro-gaming days, I used to structure my practice into training different aspects of my play in a ‘divide and conquer’ manner — different trainings for each weapon, optimizing plays for a map’s each segments, map-wide navigational movements, vertical aiming, horizontal aiming, mouse analysis (spending over $10k in mouse collection!), system and key configurations, graphic settings, item regeneration timings, and the list goes on.

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