3 Peaceful Growth Strategies for Sustainable Success and Grow Without Stress 🪴

Issue #93: Three Powerful Strategies to Prevent Burnout and Achieve Success. Minimalist. Reframe Your Failure.

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💡 Here are 3-ideas to help you learn, grow, and be inspired this week!

🎓 Learn

We all love Growth.

Growth is good: it keeps us young, sharp, curious, better, and happier.

When I think about Growth, I think:

• Intellectual Growth 

• Spiritual Growth  

• Health Growth  

• Impact Growth  

• Independence Growth

• Financial Growth

• Professional Growth

• Relationship Growth  

There are two paths (that I know) to grow in life:

1. Hustling (Stressful) Growth: Set big, crazy goals.Work 14-16 hours a day (and night), 7 days a week. Try every shortcut and hack to reach the top. The only priority is to achieve success at any cost.

2. Peaceful Growth: I’m focusing on my superpowers. I’m putting small (but consistent) efforts towards my growth. I’m growing without burning out. I’m excited and enjoying the process of growth. It fits into my daily routine.

In today’s issue, I’ll share my 3 core pillars and strategies for peaceful growth in any area of your life.

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Strategy 1: Circle of Competence

The circle of competence is building a deep (not shallow) expertise in a few areas. It’s a game of focus and discipline.

How do you do that, you may ask?

If you are just starting out, say “yes” to every opportunity; try them all. Then, at some point, figure out what 2-3 interests, products, and skills are profitable and peaceful? That’s your superpower and circle of competence.

Say “no” to everything that’s out of your circle of competence. Avoid falling into shiny objects. Continue to learn and grow in your circle of competence.

When I started my business in 2009, for the first 10 years, we said “yes” to everything (CMS development, custom development, mobile app development, etc). Then we started to build our circle of competence in CMS and even more focused on “WordPress” based CMS services. We have 4x more growth, and more importantly, the stress level of my business partner, my team, and mine has decreased significantly.

I’m not the first (or only) person advocating for peaceful growth and a circle of competence.

Warren Buffet, for instance, lives a fairly simple life, works for about 2 hours a day making a few phone calls, but spends more than 6 hours a day reading and learning. He repeatedly credits his multi billion-dollar wealth to building and staying within his “circle of competence.”

Strategy 2: Magic of Compounding

Peaceful growth rewards those who are patient and trust in the magic of compounding.

Here’s a simple example to illustrate compounding:

Imagine you have two options:

Option 1: Take $100 million right now.

Option 2: Take $1 that doubles every day for 30 days.

If you don’t understand compounding, you might choose the $100 million. However, if you chose Option 2, you’d end up with over $500 million by the end of 30 days. How?

Invest your time/money in the right idea/relationship and allow it to grow. Don’t interrupt the compounding process.

Investment: Instead of frequently moving your money between different investments (mutual funds, crypto, real estate), put it into a low-cost index fund and let it grow over time. Especially stay invested when the market is down or when people hype up trends like crypto.

Relationships: Rather than constantly seeking new friends or expanding your network, focus on nurturing a few key relationships. This will be less stressful and more rewarding as these relationships deepen. Avoid toxic relationships, as negativity also compounds.

Career: Instead of frequently changing jobs, stay with one company (if you like the culture and role). By staying longer, you build and compound relationships, trust, and knowledge, which can lead to greater opportunities and growth.

Strategy 3: Power of Consistency

On peaceful growth path → Consistency > Intensity.

In the past, I would work long hours to reach big goals. Initially, I made great progress, but I soon lost motivation, felt exhausted, and often gave up. I was also very hard on myself for failing and giving up, which created more negative energy.

A few days a month, I enjoy working intensely to push forward. But doing this every day is neither sustainable nor peaceful.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, has shown through scientific studies that small, consistent daily actions (1% better every day) lead to greater results than intense but sporadic efforts.

Here is how I apply this strategy in my life:

• I read daily for 30 mins, and that helps me to read 20-30 books in a year.

• I do 15 minutes of yoga and 15 minutes of strength workouts at home instead of going to the gym a few times a year.

• I spend 5 minutes daily learning a new language on the Duolingo app.

Here are a few more examples of the power of consistency over intensity.

Here are 20 examples of things you can do in 10 minutes or less for small, consistent, peaceful growth - https://www.anilg.blog/p/20-productive-things-you-can-do-in-10-mins

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Takeaway:

If you are young and just beginning your growth journey, I suggest (in fact, insist) that you choose Hustling Growth (because I did that too in my 20s). Why? You won’t fully appreciate peace until you’ve experienced burnout.

If you’re already on a “hustling growth” path and enjoying the journey (and haven’t burned out yet), there’s no need to change your strategy. However, I still encourage you to learn my peaceful growth strategy so you know it exists and can switch to it when needed.

For those on a peaceful growth path, here are a few additional tips:

1. Set action-based goals instead of outcome-based goals.

2. Optimize for enough, not more.

3. Focus on holistic growth.

The ultimate goal is to live a peaceful life.

🚀 Growth Tip

I’ve started to become more minimalist, and it’s very effective if you are excited about my idea of peaceful growth.

I encourage you to watch this documentary on Netflix to learn how adopting a minimalist mindset can lead to more wealth, happiness, and peace.

Here are my key takeaways from the show:

1. Less stuff allows you to enjoy them more than 1000 things.

2. An average house has 30,000 stuff.

3. Challenge: Remove one item from your house every day for 30 days.

If you’re inspired to become more minimalist, here are my three favorite rules to help you get organized.

🤩 Inspiration

In 2016, a NASA-trained engineer recruited 50,000 people to try out a new computer challenge.

Half of them (group 1) received an error message when they wrote code that failed to execute properly: “You have failed. Please try again.”

The other half (group 2) got a slightly different message: “You have failed. You’ve lost 5 points. You now have 195 points. Please try again.”

Result: Group 2 made 50% fewer attempts to solve the puzzle compared to Group 1 as they framed the failure negatively (You’ve lost 5 points).

Message: The success isn’t down to how often you fail. It’s about how you frame your failures.

Anil

May the Peaceful Growth be with you! 🪴

P.S. I’m down to a 150-day streak. In my 5-minute daily Spanish language learning on the Duolingo app, I learned 188 new words, essential phrases, and simple grammar concepts. Power of consistency 💪🏾