ExI: Creating Tools to Empower Exponential Individuals

Exponential Individuals (ExI) Project was inspired by the best-selling book Exponential Organizations and asked the question: What would an exponential individual look like? What will it take for a person to live an optimized, fulfilling life?

Formed as a joint venture between OpenExO and BostonExO and co-led by Ann Boothello, Eric Patel, and Kevin Allen, the ExI Project currently has 15 - 20 active core members from around the globe who consistently show up for our Friday virtual collaboration calls.

This article and podcast were created to celebrate the one-year project anniversary, to inform you of project highlights, AND most importantly a call to action to for others to join the project to accelerate breakthroughs for individuals and contribute to "Making Human Optimization and Self-Awareness the Norm."

[CLICK BELOW TO WATCH OR LISTEN]

PODCAST HIGHLIGHTS (25 minutes)

01:15 - ExI Project Massively Transformative Purpose (MTP). And, why it is needed now more than ever!

08:20 - How did the ExI Project come to life? Initial conversation → seed funding from the OpenExO DAO → shared purpose-driven collaboration → sub-teams to write a Playbook, develop a Game, design a Sprint.

15:15 - ‘Lack of awareness of what’s possible’ is one of several barriers to self-awareness and human optimization being your norm

19:45 - Call to Action: How you can get involved in the ExI Project

Do you want every individual in the world to live an optimized, fulfilling life? Come join the Exponential Individuals (ExI) project!

ExI is seeking additional members to join our core team. Our current projects include:

• The ExI Playbook: a hands-on guide for our intended audience to think abundantly and grow exponentially

Wanted: 1. Ghost writer(s). 2. Self-development influencers | contributors.

• Website: the creation of our first full-feature website

Wanted: Design Agency mentor for our student designers

• Gamification: a Choose Your Own Adventure game is the digital companion to the ExI Playbook and features an interactive coach who helps you learn how to coach yourself

Wanted: 1. Coders.  2. Beta participants. 3. Game Agency mentor for our                  student coders/designers

• ExI Sprint: inspired by the ExO Sprint our sprint will help individuals to get into an exponential mindset and to start their journey of becoming an Exponential Individual

Wanted: 1. Sprint Coaches to help design, deliver, and engage participants.                2. Beta participants

Participants are compensated in EXOS tokens for their participation during our weekly calls and their contributions to the projects they're involved with.

To learn more about the EXOS token you can head over to economy.openexo.com. The EXOS token is the token of the ExO Economy. The team is driving the token towards public liquidity which is really exciting!

LEARN MORE

• Visit our Website 2.0 - https://theexponentialindividual.com/
• Watch our kickoff presentation (52:00)
• Watch our 2021 recap presentation during the OpenExO 2022 Community Gathering (2:43 - 5:13)
• Read our posts in the Exponential Individuals circle on the OpenExO platform

CONTACT THE EXI PROJECT TEAM

• Join us!
• Email
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
  

RELATED

The book Exponential Organizations - https://openexo.com/exponential-organizations-book/

SWAE - https://swae.io/, “Make the One Decision that Improves Every Decision”. SWAE is a platform for idea management and bottom-up decision making - the best-kept secret behind highly innovative, disruptive, agile, inclusive, diverse organizations.

How to Use the Hero’s Journey for Self Development: 10 Hero Journey Steps - https://scottjeffrey.com/heros-journey-steps/

Joseph Campbell, the Hero’s Journey - https://prowritingaid.com/joseph-campbell-hero

FULL PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Angela: Hi, this is Angela Faye from NextGen economy podcast. Today, we're talking about exponential individuals. This was inspired by the bestselling book, exponential organizations, and asked the question, what would an exponential individual look like and what would it for a person to live an optimized, fulfilling life while a project was born between OpenExO and BostonExO and co-led by Ann Boothello and Eric Patel and Kevin Ellen. This ExI project has members who have consistently shown up for Friday virtual calls since March 2021. So coming up to the one-year anniversary, this is the longest-running initiative birthed from the EXO Economy backed by 100,000 seed EXOS since the initial launch.

Today, we wanna celebrate this milestone and we're talking to Eric and Ann to tell us lots more about the project. So welcome Eric and Ann.

Ann: It's great to be here. Thanks for having us, Angela.

Eric: Thanks, Angela. Great to be here.

Angela: Let's talk a little bit about ExI and the massively transformative purpose and vision of this project.

Eric: We came up with our MTP, our massively transformative purpose of making self-awareness and human optimization universal for everybody throughout the planet. So our vision statement, how to break that down a little bit, and we've come up with the following.

We see a world where people are living wholesome, interdependent, responsible, free, and fulfilled lives across the globe. Wow.

Angela: That's pretty impressive. And why now? More than ever, is this so important, man?

[00:02:03] Ann: We're living in a time where really systems are being challenged, right? All of us are in the space of exponential technologies.

We've been seeing massive shifts in the way industries function and the way people operate and people want to work. People no longer want to work just for the need of working. They want to lead purpose-driven lives and they need to adjust even quicker than they used to before because of these exponential changes happening that we've been anticipating for a while now.

So systems are collapsing, there's a lot going on with the crypto revolution, the blockchain revolution so the future of money is being challenged. That's one avenue, but then everything from the way people work and the way businesses are set up, with the emergence of DAO's and how do you manage teams that are living all over the globe and working at different time zones?

[00:02:56] These are all very challenging times; and when I think about the younger generation who are just falling into this whole new way of being, they probably are adapting because this is all they've known, but then you've also got that middle generation that's adjusting from a complete transition.

[00:03:12] As these systems change, because we want them to change we need tools to help us optimize our lives. So an exponential individual, isn't really someone who's, the term human potential is over overused and I think it's in the personal development space, it can be a little bit daunting, but we're just talking about people living authentically and optimizing their lives during these times when there's a great change.

[00:03:39] Angela: Just a little insight from each of you personally, what exactly is an exponential individual?

Eric: It's a great question, Ang. I think we're still piecing it together a little bit. We started with the first definition from the 'Exponential Organization's book, where your impact and fulfillment is just really large, could be as much as 10 times larger compared to your peers because of your different thinking, your behaviors and the action that you take that leverages everything that you have around you in your environment. And so this individual could also harness, as you saw in our MTP, their own internal human potential, to be at their best moment to moment. This is also where an individual could tap into their beliefs, their purpose, their virtues to help steer their life. We didn't want it to be just about high performance or high productivity or and be almost from an individual. exceeding standpoint, because we all know people that are successful, but perhaps aren't fulfilled or happy so we wanted to have both sides of that equation.

[00:04:51] Ann: That's the core. Living fulfilling lives, how can people really find a way to be true to themselves? Cause we often look at other people and we think, oh, we need to be more like that. Or we need to push ourselves so much harder.

And I think this initiative is supposed to allow people to see their range. So what is my range? Where am I at now? And what could I potentially get at and help them make these conscious choices? As Eric said like moment by moment. What's this next best step for me to take? And that is a deep question. And it's tied into bringing this sense of intuition and knowingness about what the next best step is to us; instead of going out into the world and saying, okay, what do I have to live up to? This is my range. These are the conscious choices I'm making. And this is how I'm going to give back to society by showing up authentically.

[00:05:49] Angela: I didn't prompt you that I was gonna ask this question, but could you please share your individual MTPs.

[00:05:57] Ann: Mine is upgrading society's concept of wealth and wellbeing so people can live purpose-driven lives. I think those two things tie in hand and unfortunately, with inequality and inequity we see in the world, there's this been this sense of, I need to always be productive.

I need to always be better. And you push yourself to burnout. We've seen what has happened with burnout all over the world and the great resignation. When people can start to see that abundance is really available, if they look at new avenues to tap into that, they can then upgrade their concept, wealth, and wellbeing for themselves.

[00:06:37] Angela: Love it, Eric.

Eric: How I'd like to see the world and the people in it, 20, 30 years from now, it really ties in a lot of what we're doing with ExI, and that is global, personal excellence, empowerment. Having everybody, as we've been talking about to live to their full potential, getting out of this autopilot, zombie, cruise control mode that we're all in from time to time and even moving beyond just doing and taking action, but really, truly making an impact. We always talk about how do you wanna leave this world. What kind of a legacy do you wanna leave?

[00:07:11] Are you doing that now? And are you continuing to do that? Tactically mission-wise, I'm here to help others thrive through unwavering loyalty, selfless service, and lifelong friendship.

[00:07:23] Angela: And the friendship has the part I don't hear very often and I'm completely enthralled by that. Thank you. And full confession that I have been involved in the ExI project, so I have a little bit of Intel and have respected what Eric and Ann are doing with this project and why I'm so excited about highlighting what's happening. I'll share my MTP as well. It is imagining and building places is worth living for. I'm bringing it up because one of my motivations for being involved in the ExI project is that I believe you need to be an exponential individual in order to make an exponential impact, whether it's in business or in nonprofit or in the public sector. It starts with imagining the future with all of these new convergences, and it's very difficult to do on your own. Then of course the building, which is the 'how', so we have this great idea, how are we actually gonna build it?

[00:08:21] Let's jump into the ExI project. How did we build to here? How did the EI project come to life?

Eric: It was just a simple question. As you talked about a little bit in the introduction is how would this apply to the person, has anybody done this before? And how do we define that? We've done so much work last year pulling together people and a lot of brainstorming. We rolled up our sleeves. We created canvases. We did Miro boards. There was just so much work that we did to lay the foundation for what I think is gonna be an awesome 2022.

And can you share with us how we actually got supported by the ExO Economy?

[00:08:51] Ann: People getting together and they were super passionate, and then we put together a proposal and get some EXOs granted. And we wanted to keep this project going; and we're almost one year up and we're still running, which is super exciting. But just to step back a little bit and touch on the question you asked, said, how did this start? It was literally just a conversation. Like Eric and me were having a chat and we just said isn't it individuals that make up everything right? Like the organizations, but then even let the organizations, like that's an that's one category. But when we talk about our homes and we talk about our friendships, there's a layer is to this. Unfortunately, people can show up in an organization and a team in a completely different way than they show up in their homes with their families or their friends. And it can be so contrasting. This is a really important point about the ExI initiative is we want people to show up authentically across the board, in all their relationships, starting from home, and then going out into the businesses they're building, the communities they're contributing to really be able to show up with love. Not just for the ego, but really for love, to birth something worthwhile.

[00:10:06] Angela: Thank you Ann. I would like to give a little deeper explanation of the EXO's and the grant proposals. OpenExO is a decentralized autonomous organization a DAO; and for those of you who might have to go research a little bit more about what that is. But typically a DAO will have a massively transformative purpose, and then backed by capital. And capital in our case is a utility token. We have our own economy, so it is amazing - I can't go into depth here about the depth of the economy, but there is a pool of resources with tokens and anybody in the community who has a project they believe will create exponential impact for community within the OpenExO or externally can apply for a grant.

[00:10:55] The platform that we use as a community is called SWAE, S-W-A-E; and it allows people to put together a proposal and then get peers to vote and comment and offer feedback both constructive and perhaps critical if necessary to better proposals and come out of the gate with momentum, early ambassadors and early adopters to the project. So it's quite an exciting way to get the community to commit to a project.

[00:11:28] The ExI project proposal was successful.

We're going to jump into what does the future of the ExI project hold and what are we impact are we looking to make in 2022.

We kick-started this project with a group of people coming together, talking about what was going on in the world, and talking about how they could better their own personal lives.

Then we said, why don't we just put all our collective intelligence and wisdom together and see what we can come up with to help anyone in their life, regardless of where they're at. It ended up that we started to build out a 'playbook', and then everyone got super excited. Ang, you love to talk about choose your own adventure game.

We've only started breaking out into sub-teams, but one of the things that we're prototyping is building a game that's going to help people reach this optimized state of self-awareness and self-optimization. So the game squad is one subteam that we've created because we wanna see what we could do on the gaming front. But besides that, we also broke out into a sprint group and I know Eric you're leading the group over there. What we really wanna do is to create an ExI Sprint, which mirrors what the ExO Sprint is. We're working on the duration of the sprint and the objective, or the intention of this would be to take someone through from start to end this human optimization journey into deeper self-awareness, into deeper fulfillment, and get them out the other end of that sprint saying, oh, okay, have some tools I can use to better my life and show up more fully in the world.

[00:13:04] Eric. Can you add anything to that or add about what the long-term vision is?

Eric: As Ann was mentioning, a playbook It'll be the second draft and everybody from the team's been contributing, it's just been incredible. It will eventually be an ebook and pro probably a book for now. It's a playbook and really want people to use it. Not just read it and be like, that's nice, but to use it so it's going to be full of like tips and exercises and to-dos and there's going to be tracking, we really want to do a good end to end product with this playbook. And as Ann was saying, we'd love to use the sprint to be able to manifest this - galvanize the OpenExO community, and other people from really around the world to test the playbook. Is this good enough? Are you gonna use it? Are you benefiting from it?

[00:13:45] What kind of an impact can you make in three months, for example? So we're really stoked about trying to use both the playbook in conjunction with the sprint and hopefully have some really good things come out of the sprint. So not just give us feedback on the playbook and not just make you better. But make your community, your company, the world even better.

[00:14:06] Ann: This is also a call out to the community for anyone who's a ghostwriter. We're looking for people who want to come in and clean up that playbook. So it's simplified, have a fresh perspective, because at the end of the day we want it to be usable. We want it to be consistent. We've had beautiful minds create this together, but now we're waiting to get it out there in the world.

[00:14:29] Angela: I think it's important to mention that part of the integration of the sprint, the playbook, the gamification is that no matter how you learn, or what support you need in becoming exponential, the ExI project is having a kick at the can at making sure if you learn well through reading, fantastic - we're going to have a playbook. If you really need a lot of peer-to-peer mentoring and coaching to do the work and keep you on track - that's the sprint and the, and [00:15:00]the gamification will be a long game; meaning it's something that you can do. It's really fun. It will be peer-to-peer supporting each other in becoming exponential. So regardless of how you learn, we should have a tool ready for you at the ExI project.

[00:15:16] One thing I want to bring up is in our discovery so far, what are some of the barriers to self-awareness that people are facing right now.

[00:15:31] Ann: Being too caught up in the routine, responsibilities, obligations, you don't make the time because you're not even aware that there could be better, you don't know no one's ever told you. And I think it goes back to the start of this podcast, where we were talking about how things are dramatically shifting on many fronts and it can be really daunting. People are just getting caught up in being productive and keeping up with the pace that they don't necessarily see that it starts from within to maneuver everything, all this chaos, all the changes you're going to have to get familiar with yourself, and getting familiar with yourself if you've never done it before, can be extremely uncomfortable.

We wanna help people simplify that process. Okay. Here are a couple of tools that you could potentially use, or this could be a potential pathway. As you said, if someone's better at playing a game if that attracts them, and they're not the reader sort, then maybe that will be their avenue. How could we come up with different pathways to get people into deeper self-awareness?

[00:16:40] Eric: I would echo a lot of what Ann was just talking about. And especially, for those of us that are maybe a little bit more left brain in, in the engineering IT type, like we don't have time for that kind of stuff. But in fact, you need to make time for that kind of stuff. This is where is we saw in our MTP, this is about, we had self-awareness right in there as well. So it's so many people are in that first quadrant. They don't know where they don't even know.

[00:17:00] So it's hard to get out of that and make your way through the other quadrants. We're hoping that between the playbook and, certainly this is not about one size or one path fits. All right. It's about options and having tools as Ann was talking about. Realizing that. to get to the end state, that's the important part, the means on how you get there, and when you get there is, it's up to you. We're all individuals. But certainly to be able to spend more time on yourself, starting with awareness and consciousness and intuition is a great way to start.

[00:17:34] Ann: An important point to add there is that you can take the horse to the water, but you cannot make the horse drink. And I think there's this internal calling that people have - it's cycles in our life; and sometimes we're just caught up in, in life and the lessons come to us and maybe we're not taking them in because we're in this hamster wheel.

[00:17:54] I go to Joseph Campbell's 'Heroes Journey', and I love that. The way he talks [00:18:00] about each individual getting this calling. There's a poll that asks us to stop for a moment. Oh, maybe we're not feeling too well. Maybe our health starts taking a backseat. And we can feel it - like our back hurts, or we start getting migraines. We don't know why this is happening. Why is this happening potentially, because you're not giving yourself any of that breathing room? So our body actually picks up on these emotions and stores the emotions. So I think the calling to self-awareness - if we're not gonna do it proactively, it's going to come to us and we're then going to react to it and say, okay, I need to stop for a moment. And I need to look within. I need to see what's going on with me. And that's when changes start to happen. Sometimes slowly; and sometimes it's a big slap in the face. That's when you go, whoa. Okay. Maybe I need to really reflect.

[00:18:53] Angela: I love that you brought in the body factor. I describe some of the other barriers as below-the-line states of being - if you're in a position of boredom or fear or anger, resentment. It's very difficult to go above the line and be innovative and creative, and in, healthy relationships. So I think if anybody is finding themselves below the line in some of those states, or you've had people say to you have a bit of a victim mentality, or you don't feel in control of your own destiny, as Ann said, feeling health issues. Perhaps you've got a scarcity mindset.

Getting into the abundant mindset, which is, there is so much wealth and positive energy in the world - you just have to go out and get it and attract it to you is what being exponential is all about.

[00:19:47] How would we love people to follow up with us post podcast?

Ann: I really wanna stress that this is an intergenerational project. We need people from all generations to pitch in. We want people to join the team there's so much to do.

Besides gathering people to be ghostwriters for the playbook, from a playbook perspective, if anyone's deeply immersed in the space of self-development and they want gonna take a stab at creating a playbook for humanity to evolve you're welcome to jump on board there as well.

[00:20:20] We're building out a game so we want people who are in the space of gamification; maybe you've already launched your game business and you've sold it. We have someone on our team who's done that - and he's amazing at consulting on a gaming level, but we need some builders to come support in regard to coding in regard to prototyping this game. We would love to have youth onboarded for that. So from a game squad perspective, definitely need talent on the coding, front prototyping, the game front building out avatars, all that creative fun stuff.

[00:20:54] And the people who are gonna play it, like who, who are the customers, who are the users, and if they're the ones building it, we're gonna build something that's worthwhile. We want the youth to do that with us. So that's a shout out to anyone who is working with universities, schools, communities, incubators, that are helping young entrepreneurs on their journey, this would be great to try and bring some of those young entrepreneurs in.

[00:21:17] Eric: Those are the hot irons we have in the fire now. And then in the coming weeks and months, there'll be even more, like we still need to figure out what is the evolution of ExI itself. And like how what's the format of that organizationally. We talked about a DAO - maybe that's in the future. There could be tokens. There's really all possibilities are open and it's up to the participants, the members of ExI to make those decisions, just like how a distributed autonomous organization works.

[00:21:45] Angela: If you are an influencer and an exponential individual yourself, and you'd like to help shape the future of self-awareness and human optimization being the norm, we would love to hear from you.

[00:21:58] What is the best way to get ahold of either you Ann or Eric, or get ahold of the ExI project post podcast?

[00:22:09] Ann: People from the OpenExO community, Eric's got a post in there. You can catch us on LinkedIn as well. When the podcast is shared, there will be a link provided where you can sign up to the ExI co-creation team, and then we will get in touch with you and onboard you onto the project.

[00:22:28] Angela: This has been an exciting project to be a part of. The annual anniversary event in March will talk about the evolution of the project and the success and the case studies that we have.

[00:22:41] If any of the initiatives sounded exciting, if you don't want to necessarily be part of the co-creation team, but you'd like to participate, read the book, participate in a sprint for yourself; again, I encourage you to sign up for the ExI project and you can share with us at that point that your intent is to participate as opposed to co-create on an ongoing basis.

[00:23:05] Ann, Eric, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Do you have any final takeaway momentums or words of wisdom for our listeners?

[00:23:13] Ann: Firstly, thank you Ang for your energy - your zest is amazing and we love your support on the ExI initiative. That's really one of the takeaways is the ExI initiative is to help people tap into that energy, to show up in that manner in the world so that people can feed off this energy and we can build beautiful things. Come on board the ExI initiative and learn how to tap into that great energy as you can see Ang has got over here. Thank you for having me with you.

[00:23:46] Eric: Thanks very much Angela as well. It's been amazing not only to see the project evolve over time, but the people and that on every call we have, and some of our secret sauce that we do at the beginning of the meetings and under Ann's leadership.[00:24:00]

[00:24:00] And I just wanted to thank Ann and Kevin, the fellow co-founders of ExI for sticking with this and making all this magic happen. And we're just really just getting started, so looking forward to having many more of you join us on board.

[00:24:13] Ann: It's a dream team, Eric, thank you for being you're, you said the word friendship and our friendship is what has made this baby blossom.

So thank you.

CREDITS

Featured Entrepreneur: Ann Boothello is a Co-Creator whose massively transformative purpose is to ‘Upgrade society’s concept of wealth & well-being”. With MIT, Growth Institute, SingularityUniversity and American University of Dubai education, and focused interests in Well-being | Technology | Regenerative Cities Ann has teamed up with BostonExO and OpenExO to co-lead the ExI Project.   LinkedIn | OpenExO

Featured Entrepreneur: Eric Patel serves as Chief Innovation Officer at BostonExO, New England’s first Exponential Organization (ExO) incubator helping companies, teams and individuals thrive. Eric’s massively transformative purpose is to ‘Help Others Thrive Through Unwavering Loyalty, Selfless Service and Lifelong Friendship.’ He has teamed up with OpenExO to co-lead the ExI initiative. LinkedIn | OpenExO

Host | Content Creator: Angela Faye is the Founder of Futurville, whose massively transformative purpose is “Imagining & Building Places Worth Living For”, and her massively transformative objective is to facilitate the design, promotion, and business development of 2,000 'villages of the future' by 2028 while helping 1 million people become more #futurproof.  LinkedIn  |  OpenExO

Sponsor: ExO Economy is Transforming the World Economy to a Better Future.  The NextGen Economy Podcast, Accelerating Breakthroughs, is a product of ExO Angels Inc.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not those of OpenExO Inc., its members, affiliates, or associates.  The content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult directly your own appropriate advisors and professionals as to those matters.