Day 366: What Now?
The Morning After
For context, I have just completed a 365-day writing project. I set out to create a daily devotional focused around personal growth, writing one entry per day. You can find the result here, if you are so inclined. This morning, I woke up in a very strange place. The 365 days are over. So what’s next? I’m certainly not giving up the hard-won discipline of writing something first thing each morning. And so, with no real plan, I scratched out the following post, which I am reproducing here.
My next project will be the IDEA book, explaining my personal growth framework, how I came to it, and how you can use it to maintain momentum in reaching your own goals. This little note is the beginnings of me working my way into that idea. I thought you might enjoy it. Expect to see more content here, now that I have concluded that project! And don’t forget—BE GREAT!
-Andrew
What does day 366 look like, exactly? I did not expect to be quite as emotional as I find myself a full day after I signed off on the devotional project for the last time. Yet here I am. In the positive column, I am facing the empty page in front of me with the kind of confidence that can only be built through a year of repetition. There is something to be said for muscle memory. So, on I go.
The next book will be the book that explicitly names and attempts to operationalize the IDEA framework that I created a little over two years ago. At that time, it occurred to me that all of the people I was following had distinct frameworks. Lencioni had the 6 Types of Working Genius. McManus, the 7 Frequencies of Communication. What was my thing going to be?
It seems almost silly now. An almost childish impulse to copy what I recognized as a consistent factor in the business model of the people I respected. But on the back end of a full year of not only writing about it but working through how it has shown up across the whole of human history, I think it was a fortunate step.
Why does the world need another model for personal growth? If I am to be honest, I have to admit that it does not. There are any number of books that you can pick up and — if you follow the advice in them — use as a scaffolding to create growth in your life. I have certainly gained great benefits from the work of the mentors I’ve named above, as well as many others. But there is something about IDEA that wants to come out and be seen. Something that I haven’t seen named explicitly anywhere else. So here we are.
One of the things that has been most meaningful to me in exploring this framework is its cyclical nature. We have a tendency to build linear growth paths. I am going to lose ten pounds. To do this, I will change my diet, exercise, and weigh in weekly. At some point, I will have lost the ten pounds. At that point, I will be “done.”
But then what?
That question is the problem with most growth systems that we build. The natural answer to the question is “find another goal.” Work on something else. The problem with this is that it assumes that the skills we have built in conquering one obstacle are automatically transferable to the next. But maintaining a good diet and exercise regimen does not prepare me, strictly speaking, to write a book. If we focus only on the steps that we use to solve the problem without understanding how they work, they are only useful to us in the solving of that particular problem.
When people say they are “stuck,” I think this is the wall they have come up against. They have had successes in the past, but they don’t have any way to categorize all of the things that led to those successes, to fit them into some sort of global pattern that can be applied to the next big challenge and the next. This is why I know people who have been, by any rational measure, tremendously successful but are miserable. Or those who return to the same well again and again, unable to break out of the orbit of what they know works — a path that naturally feels like going in circles. They need some way to understand not how they were able to do things well, but the kind of person they are because of the way they have done these things.
This is where IDEA, with its circular system, comes in handy. Each element not only builds on the one next to it, but reinforces it. When I have clearly named who I am and who I am becoming (Identity), I can choose Disciplines that are attached to the path from here to there. The Identity both reinforces and is reinforced by the Disciplines. When I have lined all these intentional daily choices up in a row, my large choices or moves (Execution) will be more likely to go in the direction that those Disciplines are pointing. And by recognizing this alignment, I am more likely to have the momentum to keep the Disciplines up. When I become Accountable for the results of my Execution, that direction is clarified and reinforced. And it makes the Execution easier. And then the cycle begins again. When I live a life of Accountability, that tells me the type of person that I am. Which I can compare to the person that I want to be. And that measurement is the progress in my life.
I believe that this pattern can be applied to any problem, any challenge you may be facing. You will, of course, have to fill in the blanks. Who do you want to be? What disciplines will you choose to move you in that direction, and so on. But in this book, I mean to show you how to do this. To bridge the gap between understanding and application. And if I am able to do so, I firmly believe that you will find moving from the completion of a goal to the next one easier, more natural, and less empty. Because I’ve come to believe that IDEA isn’t something that I made up at all, but something I discovered. Something that’s fundamental in the human design. And if we are able to move with the direction of that design, doesn’t it make sense that we would be moving in the most productive and efficient way?
So this is what Day 366 looks like. The same kind of morning the last 365 have been, in the most important sense. The page is still here. The discipline that I have built still belongs to me (and, as you can see, still functions). And the work, the real work, the kind that does not finish, keeps going. It turns out that there is no graduation from design, only the expression of it. And that, I think, is exactly the point.