Plus, minus equals - a powerful strategy for personal development

Posted on May 10, 2023 by David Watters, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.

Like many, January and February for me is a time of reflection and goal setting both personally and professionally. Identifying where I want to get to has always been the easy part – how to get there is where I seem to struggle. I’ve have been very inspired this year by a story that Vanessa Wright told me recently about how Sir Dave Brailsford led the British Cycling team from 1 Olympic gold medal in 76 years, to winning 7 golds out of a possible 10 in Beijing 2008 and then repeated this achievement in London 2012. How did he make this success happen in the space of just 6 years? It was breaking down the components of performance and looking at how each of them could be improved by just 1%. All of these 1%’s added up and the aggregation of these marginal gains made this phenomenal performance happen.

The idea of 1% wins really resonated with me and has driven me to devote time each week for my own personal development – listening to podcasts, watching videos and reading articles to learn more about high performance, leadership and strategy. This led me to a really straightforward but impactful strategy for personal development. I was listening to a recent episode of the James Altucher Show podcast interviewing MMA legend, Frank Shamrock, who described his concept of a Plus, Minus Equals system for personal development. After a bit of research, I also found a useful blog post by Nikhil Jois on this system.

Essentially, there are three parts to the system:

Plus – someone who is more experienced than you are that you can learn from.
Minus – someone who is less experienced than you who you can teach
Equal – someone who is currently as experienced as you that you can share discuss, share ideas and learn from along the way
It’s the power of bringing together the combination of all three elements that really resonated with me.

The Plus

You need the Plus to provide you with both guidance and inspiration. This is ultimately coaching and/or mentoring which is widely regarded as being an incredibly powerful way to learn and develop. I have been very fortunate to have an incredible mentor who challenges, questions, pushes and guides me in my career which has been very impactful on increasing the speed of my own development.

The Minus

You need the minus to embed and action what you are learning enough so that you are able to teach it. As a mentee, I was always concerned that my mentor wasn’t really getting anything out of our mentoring relationship. It wasn’t until I was involved in running and participating in a Mentoring program with JCI, as a Mentor, that I realised the learning opportunity that is created through being a mentor. Not only are you flexing a very different skill set but you also have the opportunity to learn from someone else.

The Equal

You need the equal as peer to peer learning is very effective. Sharing ideas, discussing specific learning opportunities and challenges with a peer can be a great way to develop yourself. The camaraderie of having ‘someone in the trenches’ with you will give you greater confidence and help you set benchmarks to measure your growth.

Reflecting on this system, its made me realise that whilst I have been heavily focused on the plus and dabbled in the minus, I have neglected the equal to round out my professional development. So another 1% win for me this year, will be to invest time in my peers to learn as much from them as I can, hopefully they will learn a little from me at the same time.

Are you active across the plus, minus and equals? What are some of your 1% wins for this year? I’d love to hear from you.