The Physics Of Progress

The impact of our personal development fundamentally involves one thing. Everything that you're learning about, trying out, and coming to understand is all with the intention that it helps you make forward progress in your life, business, health, and relationships. 

Tony Robbins goes on to say that “Happiness is progress” because there’s a deeply rooted part of ourselves that wants to see what we’re capable of, and as David Meltzer puts it we’re compelled by the idea that “we must be what we can be”.

But chasing this idea of making progress, without a real plan to achieve it, is wasteful. Branching off to another brilliant personal development mind, Tom Bilyeu from Impact Theory says that we must understand the physics of progress so that we can leverage it to maximize our growth.

Bilyeu breaks down the physics of progress into 4 parts: 

1) You need a goal. This is the outcome that everything must optimize around, and the more specific your goal the better you’ll be able to evaluate progress.  

2) You craft a hypothesis on the best approach you know of to achieve that goal. This pulls from your own experience, advice you’ve heard, and other data points you have access to. 

3) You run a test. You test your hypothesis and observe the results of how things went. 

4) You evaluate your outcomes against your goal and understand patterns, limiting factors, and new things to consider.

Then you go right back to the top, you start all over again with a new more informed goal and more information to formulate a new hypothesis.

This very closely mirrors the process I use to improve my life and work, which is called the “Think Plan Do Review” cycle. It follows the same steps as Bilyeu’s process to run through an iterative loop that helps you make progress toward any goal. 

If you don't have a process in place to leverage the physics of progress, then it's likely that you're stuck getting the same results over and over again. In order to know what's actually working for you, and what to invest in, you need a way to track performance.

That's just one of the 9 Super Habits that accelerate you toward your personal and professional goals!