One of the core building blocks of the Praxis educational experience is the Personal Development Project, or “PDP“. A PDP is simple: a self-chosen 30-day challenge with tangible benchmarks and outcomes, documented and demonstrated.
Project based learning – tackling a challenge that the learner has individual, intrinsic motivation to tackle – is the most valuable method for transforming your mind and habits and building your personal capital. It bypasses dichotomies between theory and practice by focusing instead on desired outcomes. It’s about who you want to become, and what in your unique situation is most likely to help you get there. This is the way most people approach physical health and fitness, but it’s surprisingly rare when it comes to mental and emotional intelligence, character, and skills. It shouldn’t be. It works.
So how do our participants get started with a PDP? My favorite method is to let your obstacles take the lead. Obstacles often hide or disguise themselves, so first you have to find them.
Jot down some bigger picture outcomes or goals or descriptions of the kind of person you want to be. Maybe, “I want to be a published writer”, or, “I want to travel 6 months out of the year”, or, “I want to earn a living as a freelance designer”, or, “I want to be a go-to expert on nanotechnology that people interview”. Think in terms of who you want to be and what kind of experiences and outcomes you want to have, not in terms of titles or labels.
Now that you have a handful of these big picture goals listed, pick one and ask yourself what is keeping you from doing or being that right now. Maybe you’re writing isn’t sharp enough, or you are too insecure to submit to a publication. Maybe you can’t afford the travel, or your design skills aren’t hireable, or you know nothing about nanotech. Try to get specific in terms of what’s keeping from these goals. “I’m not organized enough to handle multiple clients”, or, “I procrastinate too much” are good examples.
Now you have your obstacles.
Your obstacles are invaluable because they inform you as to what kind of activities are going to be valuable to you. If procrastination is one of your major obstacles you could build a very basic yet incredibly powerful PDP where you, for example, read one chapter from “The War of Art” and write and publish a blog post every day for 30-days. The mental tools in the book combined with the no-escape activity of daily blogging will absolutely and dramatically improve you ability to create even when the mood isn’t right. You will become a better person in that 30 days and you will chip away at one of those obstacles – maybe even obliterate it altogther.
This is just one example. Maybe you commit to reading five books on a topic in a month. If you read five books on any topic you will immediately be in the top 5% of people with knowledge on the topic. It’s surprisingly easy to make huge gains.
Whatever goals, obstacles, and activities you identify, the most important thing is doing it. You must make progress on it every single day. The beauty is, anyone can do something for 30 days. It’s hard, but not so hard that you have any excuses. You must make the activities measurable and demonstrable. You must setup an accountability method. At Praxis we do this by asking participants to build a personal website and publicly share their PDP activities and then document them as they complete it. Thier advisors are there to coach and challenge them as they craft and complete the PDP’s.
In the end they have tangible evidence of how they increased their value that month – based on their own goals, not anyone else’s. More importantly, they become more of who they want to be. The principle of compound interest is powerful and it applies to more than money. Improve yourself by 1% every day and soon nothing will be out of reach.
Whether a hard skill, soft skill, body of knowledge, a network, a mindset, or a habit: if you want growth and transformation – what real education is – I cannot recommend a PDP enough.
Try building your own. If you have a hard time getting started, try one that we created at Praxis as an excellent entry point. See if you can stick to it, making progress every day. It’s a lot harder than you think, and far more rewarding than you can imagine.
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