May
20 Fast Growth vs. Slow Growth
We're a microwave society, and we have been for most of our lives. Why wait? Use Uber or AirBnB. There's an app that will get it delivered. Put it in the cloud, don't buy your own infrastructure.
But there are things that take time. Personal growth takes time. Wisdom. Perspective.
You can speed it up - to a point. Learn to be present. Learn to be congruent. Learn to be intentional in everything you do.
But some things you just have to work at, practice, do over and over again. Mastery comes after the apprenticeship.
If you are looking to grow, or looking to help people grow, you need to set a couple of expectations.
1) It will take a lot of time, where not much seems to be changing.
2) At some point, something will change internally, and the person will be able to access an entirely new level of achievement, mastery, or influence. There may be few signs that the change is coming, but when the prerequisites are there, and the opportunity presents itself, BAM.
There are lots of precedents for this kind of growth. Complexity research. Supercriticality of liquids. Economic crashes. Sandpiles.
In the pre-Cambrian period, there were very few types of animals (according to the fossil record). In a geological instant, every major phyla and body type that we see now, along with many that haven't survived, suddenly appeared, in what is known as the Cambrian Explosion.
If someone was managing biological diversity, they would have been fired during the Pre-Cambrian period. But if the growth and development would have stopped at that point, we wouldn't be here.
If your company is measuring growth linearly, you may be settling for visible things that can be gamed, but which do not produce real growth. If you are managing for real growth, you have to have some patience.
You as an individual need to be growing all of the time. It might not be visible. Don't quit.
You never know when the explosion will occur, and you don't know what internal things need to change to unleash it.
Never stop growing, even if nobody else sees it.
Your day will come.
Categories: Business , Methodology