Using the Power of 3 to Grow Your Personal Brand

By Isaac Mashman · February 27, 2024

Information is meant to be distributed and acted on. From their earliest days, children ask questions to satisfy an inquisitive nature, building knowledge either through their own experience or by learning from someone else's. Learning from others is the more efficient path, but even the best information is worthless without application.

As a child, the goal is to learn as much as possible. In adulthood, that curiosity narrows to only what serves a career or basic needs. So set the rhetoric aside for a moment and turn that childlike question toward something that actually matters: what's the one problem standing between you and growing your personal brand? Your business's growth? Acquiring new knowledge?

Most people answer the first two with “not enough attention” or “not enough money.” The third, they usually can't answer at all.

Enter the Power of 3.

Triangles have three points and three sides. The Holy Trinity, in many Christian traditions, is three separate but like entities. There's the idea of a third eye, and three has been considered a perfect number throughout history. There's something about it that resists easy explanation.

The Power of 3 isn't a slogan. It's a system. If the goal is something beneficial and quantifiable, start by doing it three times. Scaling a personal brand: message three new people each day. Building a business: make three sales calls each day. Acquiring knowledge: read three pages of a nonfiction book each day.

On its own, three seems insignificant. Multiply it by the number of days you apply it, and the power shows itself. Three times thirty, one month, is ninety. Three times ninety, three months, is two hundred seventy. Three times three hundred sixty-five, one year, is one thousand and ninety-five. At that point the figure stops being a three-digit number and becomes a four-digit one.

Now you've done something over a thousand times.

You had 1,095 conversations, made 1,095 sales calls, read 1,095 pages.

That number gains real strength once momentum enters the picture: daily effort compounds. You alone had 1,095 conversations, but there's no counting how many people you reached once those conversations were repeated to colleagues and friends. Attention scales. You alone made 1,095 sales calls, but that doesn't account for referrals; if even one in ten led to a referral, that's 109 new clients beyond whoever you already worked with. You alone read 1,095 pages, but that doesn't count the days curiosity took over and you read fifty, or an entire book. It's fair to say this method alone could account for a dozen or more books a year.

The Power of 3 mitigates failure.

The problem for most people isn't a lack of understanding. It's a lack of curiosity.

There's something to learn from a child's inexplicable curiosity about the world: it's what leads to conversation, to problem-solving in business, to a genuine desire to learn. The results won't show immediately, but with time they compound into something much larger than the three small steps that started it.

Only three examples have been given here, but the Power of 3 extends to nearly any problem worth solving. This is one of your solutions.

Knowledge without application is just that: knowledge. Apply the Power of 3 to your own situation, and watch the results compound. It isn't a call for complexity or motivational mantras. It's simply something that works.

This essay was written by MCG founder Isaac Mashman.