Full Stack Thinking?

If you’re anything like me, then you’re the kind of person that is perpetually curious, keen to learn, and eager to better yourself in many different aspects of your life.

Whether it be knowledge, skills, fitness, or business, you find yourself wanting to devour every resource you can to better yourself, and become a more-complete version of yourself.

But there’s a problem.

We are living through an era of abundance. The “information age” has brought unfettered access to data and resources, and its growth is not slowing down.

It can be extremely difficult to cut through the noise and find real signal. To identify and action only the most valuable information.

I find myself constantly overwhelmed by the availability of everything online, and that doesn’t help in achieving the over-arching goal of personal growth.

Full Stack Thinking is the term I’m using to frame how I approach this problem.

The idea is to treat personal growth like full stack development, but applying it to everything in life rather than just software engineering.

Thinking about things this way is an acknowledgement that the task is huge, and there’s no real finish line. Life is complex and we’re all striving to improve ourselves in multiple, often orthogonal aspects of it.

Becoming a full stack developer is often seen as a way to achieve true independence in software development. It’s not necessarily what you want to do if you want a job, but it’s absolutely the way to go if you want to build something for yourself. Something that you own in its entirety.

I think this maps neatly onto personal development. We are each improving ourselves for our own, specific needs, and we tend to do it in search of independence in the domain of happiness and fulfilment. Not for somebody else’s benefit.

Full Stack Thinking is now my mindset for personal growth, and I want to document my progress and struggles - in trying to learn and improve daily - with you.

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