The Z-Factor: Set Yourself Up for Compounding Growth
If you put in hard work, expect to be rewarded.
And if you keep plowing ahead with hard work, how far can you go? It turns out that this approach leads to two things: limited results and burnout. To really experience compound growth, you have to find ways to maximize the pay off of your efforts.
That means unlocking the secret to success: the Z-Factor.
What is the Z-Factor?
We can visualize success as being composed of three factors, what we’ll call X, Y and Z. If we plot these on a graph, results (aka “success”) would be measured as a combined total of all three factors.
X-Factor: Daily habits that require (and reward) consistent effort. This includes things like writing a blog, painting daily, or cold-calling prospects.
Y-Factor: This is time spent doing X. As we continue to carry out our duties, over time the effort compounds, especially when combining multiple X activities.
Z-Factor: To compound yet again, we need community. Meeting and building our tribe multiplies the effort and leverage we put in at X, and it explodes the rewards we get out of Y.
Most people only think in terms of X and Y, and their results end up being… average. That’s not to say X and Y aren’t important. Each factor is mission-critical, without all three you can’t expect much. And for most people, the Z-Factor is the piece they are missing.
How to Combine X, Y, and Z
The X-Factor is the cornerstone of everything. As the old joke goes, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Answer: “Practice.”
You have to pick up a cello to learn how to play, but if you only pick it up once, you’ll never nail that Bach sarabande. Consistently working on X-Factor activities brings you to Y. Now you’re practicing every day, taking classes, studying music theory, and doing it all over and over again.
With Y, you bring together multiple X-Factors (the practice, classes, study, etc.) and create compounding effects. Practice allows you to focus on new techniques during classes, your expanding repertoire means you integrate more music theory. In other words, Y allows you to compound.
Most people stop here with X and Y. But you don’t want to be like most people — you want to play at Carnegie Hall.
The Z-Factor makes the most out of X and Y activities. The Z-Factor is reaching out to peers to play together, finding mentors, and getting involved with local musical theater or an amateur orchestra. Now, you meet more and more people involved in music. These people know still more people, giving you an ever-expanding pool of potential partners and mentors, and peers.
Next stop: Carnegie Hall.
Most of the time we think about people’s successes as purely their own. But we all rely on a network to give us the opportunities we need. Yes, we always have to show up for ourselves (X and Y), but if we don’t show up for others (Z), we won’t build the relationships necessary to fulfill our full potential.
Building a community means giving back to it, and when you do, you find your personal development skyrockets. Once we pull back and fit the hard work we do into a group of like-minded people, they take us beyond where we could ever go alone. That’s the power of the Z-Factor.
Why community is the ultimate leverage
One of the core principles around the content I create is that leverage is the key to living a truly bold and impactful life. There are many forms of leverage that you might be able to employ that can multiply your individual efforts: media allows you to share a message to thousands of people while you sleep, running a business or enterprise allows you to collect revenue from customers and hire employees, and even reading 100 philosophy books allows you to leverage your knowledge to make better decisions when the time arises.
Out of all these forms of leverage, the aim is to multiply your effort so you’re achieving more by doing less.
Community becomes a sort of “holy grail” of leverage by giving you the ability to tap into the resources of other people who all have their own unique leverage accumulated. If you have a YouTube influencer in your tribe, you can ask them to collaborate and now you’re tapping into their audience. If you have a friend with years of business experience, you can lean on them for advice to save you from figuring things out on your own. If you have a network of friends who all have their own businesses, you can ask them for referrals when you’re looking to make a hire or build a sales team.
