For our Grove Ave venture, Welton and I have been working through a concept that we’re calling “Foundation of Growth”. As we begin to build up the Grove Ave brand and philosophy, we’ve been looking for ways to articulate the company’s mission. I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts here and explain how the Foundation of Growth tie into the Grove Ave mission.

Over the past couple of years, Welton and I have talked at great lengths about adopting good habits. We believe it’s fundamental to living a productive and fulfilling life. As we talked more and more about good habits, we started to identify categories that these habits could fall into. The categories, taken together, started to feel like a support structure for further growth. We worked through the categories, combining some and editing out others, until we arrived at five of them. We called these five the Foundation of Growth. The five categories, which have become “elements”, are as follows: Diet, Fitness, Sleep, Mind, and Relationships.

The Foundation of Growth is about establishing a baseline through a system of good habits. By being mindful and embracing a standard for what you eat, how much you exercise, how well you sleep, how you expand your knowledge, and how you get along with others, we believe that it becomes easier to set new goals for growth and achieve them. The Foundation of Growth is about deliberately making choices in critical areas that will protect your health, make you smarter, and also make you happier. With these in place, you can set your sights higher and challenge yourself to take on ambitious endeavors with confidence.

I want to share a few thoughts on why we chose these five elements:

1 – Diet

Eating is an everyday activity that plays a crucial role in our health and well-being. If you eat 3 meals a day, snack at least once a day, and go out for pre-dinner drinks a few times a week, that’s more than 30 times you’re making choices on what goes into your body. Over the course of a few weeks, a few months, and a few years, these choices add up. We see a great deal of possibilities in the types of habits you can develop when it comes to diet.

2 – Fitness

Our bodies were built to move, and yet, we often struggle to get an adequate amount of exercise. We want to explore habits, motivations, and incentives that can get people to embrace an active lifestyle. We’re also fascinated by the discipline, endurance, and personal challenges that exercise and sports present.

3 – Sleep

We know that a deep, rejuvenating sleep can jumpstart your day and greatly improve performance in many areas of your life. Whether it’s getting enough sleep or the quality of your sleep, we think sleeping is an activity worth much consideration.

4 – Mind

We debated on whether to call this Intellect or Mind. We went back and forth on it a few times. In the end, we decided on Mind because we like its more expansive definition and thought that Intellect could be a subset of Mind. I think the topics we explore with this building block may evolve over time, but our initial focus will be on the mind’s ability to learn and process new knowledge and the way the mind perceives and reacts to external forces.

5 – Relationships

So much of our happiness is tied to how we feel about our relationships with other people. These may be family members, significant others, co-workers, friends, classmates, and neighbors. We’re interested in how habits can strengthen and provide greater meaning to these relationships, whether it’s through outward behaviors or through internal reflections.

Focus on Growth

Growth can come in many forms. It can be the acquisition of a new skill through endless hours of practice and learning. It can be progress on a monumental project that takes years to pull off. It can be designing a life that allows you to maximize time with family while making a comfortable living. The Foundation of Growth, we believe, provides a firm support layer that equips the individual with the stamina, energy, motivation, and positive attitude to really focus on growth.

We see a great deal of opportunity in mining these five elements for content and products that can help our audience become more mindful about their habits and everyday choices. We’re currently collaborating on an e-book that will expand upon the Foundations of Growth concept and introduce what we’re calling Microhabits. If you’d like to receive an update when the book is ready, sign up to receive updates at www.groveave.co.