Stop playing to grow.
That’s your investors’ game.
Stop playing to survive.
That’s playing not to lose.
Start playing to win.
And play your own game.
Tag: Growth
Why Aren’t They Growing?
We often say
plants grow
when the right conditions
are present.
This is true.
What’s often unspoken,
though,
is time.
Even with the right conditions,
if we stare at the plant
second by second,
wondering why it’s not growing,
we can easily get frustrated
by their lack of growth.
In Praise of Survival
In startup circles,
there is wide-spread worship
of “growth.”
The lure of building a company worth $1 billion,
known as a “unicorn,”
looms large.
In contrast,
we often hear people demean survival,
with phrases like “mere survival is not enough,
we must thrive!”
…
The reality is that building a company
often feels like being in a war.
Not because we’re in a competition,
but because we get hurt,
—emotionally—
often to significant degrees.
And what I find interesting
is that when I help founders recover
from these emotional wounds,
I often see them naturally grow—
their minds,
their hearts,
and their relationships.
The kind of growth made possible
precisely because they got hurt.
Just as our muscles grow
by getting hurt
then recovering,
perhaps we can also grow,
by recovering.
By surviving.
By living.
By telling the God of death,
“Not today.”
Growth on our own terms
We appreciate growth
when we grow on our timeline
in the direction we want to grow.
If we force others’ growth
to satisfy our own need for contribution,
no matter how good our intentions,
it’ll likely be unappreciated.
In fact,
others may even rebel
and do exactly the opposite of what we wish.
What a waste of time and effort, no?
Misunderstanding How Lobsters Grow
There’s a meme on how lobsters grow
by shedding their rigid shell and producing a new one.
It points out that before it can grow,
a lobster feels stress against their shell.
Thus, the moral of the story is:
1) Treating stress as a problem to be solved is to prevent growth.
2) Stress can be a sign of growth.
What it skims through, though,
is how lobsters need a rock
to protect itself from predators
before it can shed its shell.
So if our client, employee, boss, or partner
seems to be unwilling to let go of their shell,
or to grow & innovate,
the question isn’t “Why are they being so rigid?!”
It’s “Do we have a rock in place?”
Let me know if you’re willing to be a rock.