One Thing Every Week: A Practical Analysis of the Productivity Benefits Gained through Self-Reflection
Take what I've learned from writing a newsletter to power your own self-improvement, without writing a newsletter.
Welcome to A Founder’s Life for Me! I’m Alek. I provide practical recommendations on how to build your company and career based on my experiences building tech companies.
Effective learning through weekly reflection.
After twenty editions of A Founder’s Life for Me and 100+ hours of writing, I want to share the most significant benefit I’ve gained. As cliche as it is to “get 1% better every week,” the self-reflection gained from this newsletter has made that a reality for me. You’ll leave this article with:
examples of how the self-reflection in A Founder’s Life for Me has helped me
a time-efficient framework for how to put it into practice yourself
To continue learning from my experiences as a founder through weekly 10-minute reads, subscribe below.
Learning should change your behavior.
I believe the most valuable part of learning is how it changes you. If learning doesn’t change how you handle situations, what’s the value?
In theory, aspiring to be 1% better every week sounds like a great idea, but I’ve historically struggled to implement it. I’ve told myself that no intentional effort was needed, “I don’t need to go out of my way. I’ll learn from my mistakes and get better.” Now, after twenty editions of A Founder’s Life for Me, I realize I was wrong. It does take intentional effort to learn and change effectively.
A Founder’s Life for Me has led to 20%+ improvements across personal KPIs.
Over the last two weeks, here are two examples of how past reflections through A Founder’s Life for Me have changed my behavior:
#1: Stay customer-focused
In “Four Principles for Successful, Long-term Customer Relationships,” the customer relationship equation (I’m going to start referring to it as the “CRE”) provides a holistic way to analyze the health of your customer relationships. At its core, the CRE encourages me to ask, “How can I reduce the cost on the customer, increase trust, drive more value, and build a personal relationship?”
When I developed the CRE, I only considered how the concepts could be applied to existing customers. However, after writing about it, I realized the CRE also applied to other aspects of customer relationships. The results I’ve seen from applying the CRE have continued to surprise me.
After I applied the CRE to sales outreach, I shared how it increased my sales outreach response rates by 100%. Beyond that example, I’ve used the CRE to:
Day-to-day customer conversations, which resulted in more engaged customers and very positive feedback.
Contract renewal conversations, which resulted in a verbal agreement to an early renewal of a contract at a higher price-point than the original contract.
Marketing pages for my startup, which resulted in a 20% increase in organic engaged sessions per week.
I’ll continue to share the results from applying the CRE in future editions of A Founder’s Life for Me.
#2: Focus my time on the right things
In one of my first posts, “The #1 Way to 10x Your Company’s Odds of Success,” I shared the mindset and methodology behind proving your idea will work before you spend time building it. Since then, there were several days when I planned to code a pointless feature, where, instead, I talked to customers or built things that real customers told me they needed. The principles of this article alone have already saved me two weeks of wasted development time over the last three months.
You don’t need to start a newsletter.
Over the last five months, my newsletter has saved me 100 hours by shifting my focus from low-value to high-value work. I've spent 80 hours writing it.
To reap these benefits, you don't need to start a newsletter; schedule time for weekly self-reflection where you:
Focus on a single topic. The focus allows you to explore every aspect of your thoughts instead of a cursory analysis.
Write down your thoughts for an imagined external audience. The imagined audience will encourage you to simplify your thoughts as much as possible.
Spend 15 minutes following a simple thought map, “Assert your idea, support it with evidence, and write a recommendation.”1 You can spend more time, but start small and see where you get.
Over time, you’ll develop a compendium of learnings that you can continue to evolve and apply.
What are your systems for continuous self-improvement? If you'd like to discuss this, please comment below or email me at newsletter@alekhagopian.com.
This is the map I follow for all of my content.