Struggle Just Enough Killing It
Maturity models have been around for a long time. The purpose is to measure or evaluate the maturity of a system. In 1980ish, the US Government was tired of paying for crappy software systems so they commissioned some smart people at Carnegie Mellon University to invent a way to measure software system maturity. The Capability Maturity Model was born.
This model has 5 levels that evaluate your system of building software. The maturity levels tell you what kind of quality you will get by a company or group building that software. The 5 levels are basically laid out like this
- 1 No system, ad hoc development, low quality output
- 2 Basic systems in place, better quality, but still on the low end
- 3 Documented system in place and followed, good enough for government work
- 4 Measured system in place, managed to produce high quality
- 5 Optimized system in place to generate the highest quality
For our purposes, we will change this around and use it to evaluate our life system. We will only have 3 levels to make it simple.
- Struggle – You have no system in place to manage your life. You are always behind, never feeling accomplished, will never get ahead, will never be able to retire, and you will die working.
- Just Enough – You are making ends meet, not increasing income or advancing career fast enough, you will make it to retirement eventually.
- Killing it – You have the future planned out and are making the right choices to fulfill that future. You have a system in place to ensure you are increasing your income, planning for your future, and setting meaningful life goals.
Where are you?
So where do you think you land? Its ok if you don’t know yet. Earlier in life you can be in the struggle stage because you don’t have the right skills or experience to work in a high paying job or earn a high salary. That’s fine as long as you understand this and are working towards increasing income and getting into that higher earning job. Remember, inflation does not care about you or anyone else, it will just keep increasing year after year and crush the value of your money. You have to have systems in place to work against inflation.
Take some time to think about which category you are in and decide what you want to do. If you are constantly struggling and never getting ahead, do you really want to continue down that path, or do you want to change? If you are fine struggling and blaming everyone else for your misery, then stop reading and go somewhere else. You are not going to get anywhere by doing that.
If you are doing just enough, then you have the potential to move into Killing It if you take some deliberate steps to improve your system. You may have some systems in place like a budget, goals, and investing. But are you working on improving those? How about trying some new tools like CHAMP?
If you are already Killing it, then awesome, keep it up and don’t stop. You have to keep it going until you don’t need to continue.
The Nerd Zest is all about motivating you to start Killing it. My system is not the end all be all of success, but it is a system that works for me and I would like others to give it a try. You have to choose to be successful and live on purpose. Nobody else can do this for you. Make the choice to live on purpose and start killing it.