Keeping Track Of My Personal Development

Keeping Track of Your Personal Development

Hi everyone. My name is Juvani Beckford. My talk is really around the why behind why I track. And it really started about when I was 16.

I grew up in the Bronx and I was a very, I grew up in a very impoverished area and for me, tracking was a way to escape my circumstances. I needed to be able to know myself, so I could become a better version of me, and that was going to be my main resource. My awareness and the data I created was going to be my fuel to pretty much blast out of the hole I was in growing up in the Bronx.

And mobile really helped me to leverage on so many new technologies and services that were coming out to be able to track myself more consistently, to be able to get insights from that data, and to be able to take action on that data.

And so this is what my mobile folder grew into, and here you see a number of columns of different tracking apps, and basically I figured out what were the core pillars of things that I wanted to track. I knew that energy was a very important part of that. there’s your mental energy, your physical energy, your spiritual energy, your emotional energy.

Energy is what I needed to prioritize almost more than time, even though time is a very important equation to doing productive work. I realized that energy was even more important to be the catalyst, so I could have impactful work.

And I realized that if I want to become a better person, I needed to be able to create the habits and characteristics and traits that will help me be the person that I wanted to be in the future.

So, what did I do? I used mobile apps. And how did I do it? I focused on the problem. I knew I didn’t want to just track just to track. I knew that I needed to focus on a problem, start manually and figure out, okay, what are the fundamental steps and actions that I need to take to get to a certain destination.

And once I focused on the problem, and once I mapped out the manual steps that I needed to take, I was able to find the right services and tools to help make that process much more frictionless, much more streamlined.

So what did I learn? I learned that when you’re tracking and you’re learning an gathering all this information, you almost want to use that information to train your intuition.

I realized that even though I was born in a disadvantaged environment and I didn’t have the right environment to stimulate my intuition and get the right experiences, I could use incremental steps and leverage my steps to train my intuition, so that when I faced even more challenges in the future my intuition would be better prepared to handle thos bigger tasks.

And as I acted, and I recorded, I created basically a feedback loop and system that could allow me to do even more challenging tasks, and most of those tasks were related to skill development and learning, and in addition to building up my habits.

Another thing that I learned is don’t take data personally. Even although you are tracking your personal data, you don’t want to attach yourself too strongly to that data. Because once things go wrong it’s going to show up in the data. The data is a lie, and you don’t want to take the data personally and kind of make yourself adverse to continue to track the data, because you don’t want to figure out what the real problems are.

Another thing that I learned is to keep the why in mind. I realized I was tracking so I would survive and so I could thrive. And I needed that data so I could build that awareness, so I could basically navigate the uncertain waters in life that I would encounter.

And, one of the most important things that I learned was don’t just measure, act. So, you won’t even create much data if you’re not acting on that data. But, once you act on that data and you learn, you need to be able to make subtle adjustments. Whenever I failed, I didn’t see failure as being a negative act. I saw failure as additional information and data points that I could leverage to make better actions in the future.

But it starts with acting, and it also is empowered by knowing why you are acting. And if you’re acting for no reason, it’s kind of like if you’re super productive and super busy all the time, but you are not working on the right things, then there’s really no reason for doing anything at all.

So, understand the why, take action, build your intuition so you can be better prepared for whatever challenges you face. And basically, use data as your sidekick. Use data as your mentor. You can help yourself by knowing yourself to a greater degree.

And that’s all from my talk.