Growth takes time. But, don’t take your time.

Randy Gibson
8 min readApr 26, 2023

This is two-part series on growth. Find part one here.

“You do not just wake up and become the butterfly. Growth is a process.” — Rupi Kaur

It took four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge.

It will take three years for a new business to see a profit.

Infamously, it takes an average of ten years or 10,000 hours to become an elite performer.

It takes fifteen years for a college basketball coach to win a national championship.

These are the end results, of course. We never get to see the growth that happens in between — the thousands of individual moments.

But, imagine if we could. What if every day was recorded, like the Truman Show, except that when we reached the end of each day, week, quarter, or year, it got played back to us like a time-lapse?

What would your time-lapse look like?

A time-lapse needs a good foundation. This was the topic of part one.

Then, it needs methods and strategies to build upon this foundation. That’s the topic of part two, below.

Our first strategy and the power behind a good time-lapse — compounding growth.

Yes, that confusing concept they tried to teach us in school with the infamous question,

“Would you rather have $1,000,000 now or a penny ($0.01) doubled every day for a month?”

Instant gratification chooses the $1 million. Delayed gratification, a key to compounding growth, chooses a penny doubled.

Another infamous question is also instructive:

“How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?”

Researchers have answered this question, kind of. The results varied between 75 and 1,000 licks.

Some researchers even created a licking machine because they said, “Resisting the temptation to bite into one is tough.”

The temptation of a tootsie pop is a great metaphor for the challenges of achieving compounding growth:

  1. We have goals (center of the tootsie pop)
  2. We need habits on the path to our goal (repeated licking + delayed gratification)
  3. We are tempted away from these habits and goals (sugar + instant gratification)

We face similar temptations every day. Whether it’s food, phones, or media, it’s a race to grab our attention and capitalize on our reward systems, like dopamine.

“Every behavior that is highly habit-forming — taking drugs, eating junk food, playing video games, browsing social media — is associated with higher levels of dopamine.” -James Clear, Atomic Habits

Sometimes we are the ones doing the tempting. For example, if you spend too much time talking about your goals instead of executing them:

“In high performance goal setting theory, there’s a lot of good evidence that says; if you set high hard goals and you want to accomplish them, keep them to yourself. The minute you say it out loud, you actually release dopamine. Your brain thinks you already got the reward for accomplishing the thing so you have less motivation to do it.” -Steven Kotler

This is why Steven Kotler advises us to:

“Never trust the dopamine.”

By not trusting the dopamine, we can leverage delayed gratification.

And through delayed gratification, we can begin piecing together our time-lapse.

And through a time-lapse, we can achieve compounding growth.

Growth strategy #2: Become an experimenter.

Experimentation requires us to think and plan, to determine a measure of success, and will inevitably end with learning.

“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” -Eric Ries

But, we can’t just run one experiment. We need to do it continuously. To do something continually, it needs to become a part of our identity.

“True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.” -James Clear, Atomic Habits

By becoming an experimenter, we become someone who has established a habit of running experiments.

Thomas Edison, the greatest inventor of all time, was an inventor. William Shakespeare was a playwright. Bob Dylan and Madonna are singer-songwriters.

Edison has 2,332 patents, Shakespeare 37 plays, and Dylan and Madonna 82 albums.

Why can we only remember a handful of their greatest hits? It’s because… they only had a few greatest hits.

Greatest hits are difficult. Most people never achieve one, let alone a few.

The key to achieving a greatest hit is repetition. And, a side effect of repetition is… a greatest hit:

“The quality of creative ideas is a positive function of quantity: The more ideas creators generate (regardless of the quality), the greater the chances they would produce an eventual masterpiece.“ -Wired to Create

So, if we focus on quantity, we get quality? That’s what a University of Florida creative photography class discovered after splitting their class in half and telling one group to focus on the quantity of photos and the other on the quality of photos.

We find similar themes elsewhere. A 2018 study on entrepreneurship found that a 60-year-old entrepreneur is 3X as likely to build a successful startup than a 30-year-old.

Why? Age is a great predictor of experience and experience is a great predictor of a lot of experimentation and learning.

In fact, the strongest predictor of someone’s income is their age. The average 45-year-old makes almost double what a 25-year-old makes. (🤞 crossing my fingers in hopes that twenty-somethings don’t show up to HR asking for equal pay)

Of course, 25-year-olds can have great wealth. But, usually, when you look at their experience it’s as vast as a 45-year-old’s.

This leads us to growth strategy #3: growth takes time, but don’t take your time

The longer we wait the more confident we become. But, confidence comes with a tradeoff.

“There’s a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late.” -Seth Godin

In business, we tend to dig deeper into quantitative data to build our confidence. But, as we build this confidence we also accumulate assumptions. To keep our assumptions to a minimum, we have to continually test them with reality.

This is what co-founder Marc Randolph said contributed to Netflix’s success:

“No idea performs the way you expect once you collide it with reality. And, the more I learned, the more I believe that is true. What this has forced me to do is say, ‘I got to stop thinking about things and I got to just begin doing them because that’s the only way I am going to figure out whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea.’”

There are two important principles for executing strategy #3: taking initiative and applying lean thinking.

Taking initiative is leaping in with the knowledge that you will feel uncertain but will come out better on the other end. It’s about making things happen.

“This isn’t about having a great idea (it almost never is). The great ideas are out there. Nope, this is about taking initiative and making things happen.” -Seth Godin

Applying lean thinking unlocks our ability to take initiative because it allows us to remove our limitations.

Lean thinking is about figuring out the minimal amount of effort needed to move forward with our idea. In business, we call this the minimum viable product (MVP) and it’s all about getting the most learning with the least amount of effort.

To supercharge all three strategies, and any others we may come up with, we can deploy strategy #4: treat your brain like a database.

Every second of every day your brain is consuming information and storing data. The only time it isn’t is when you are sleeping, and then it is processing this stored data.

The data in your brain is the only data you have for making decisions. A very crude example of this is illustrated in an article, “Where do our best ideas come from?”:

Illustrated by John Vanderveen

The person on the left and the person on the right are extracting data from two different databases.

We can apply this example everywhere. A simple example is the media: Those who watched six or more hours of coverage about the Boston Marathon bombings were more likely to develop PTSD than the people who were actually at the marathon.

There’s also a workplace equivalent. In Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres explains how to build products that deliver value:

“Teams make decisions every day. Our goal is to infuse those daily decisions with as much customer input as possible.”

To achieve this, our employee’s brains need to be filled with customer data.

Modified from marketoonist.com

Of course, our brains aren’t this simple.

For example, up to 95% of our brain is spent on unconscious processing. This means we are unconsciously consuming and storing data in hidden-away databases.

How do we leverage this hidden-away data? Our brain has two approaches to retrieving data:

  1. A conscious, top-down way
  2. An unconscious, bottoms-up way

The first leverages more of our brain’s left hemisphere and the outcome is linear thinking. It narrows our focus and produces reductive, mechanistic, sequential thinking.

The second leverages more of our brain’s right hemisphere and the outcome is non-linear thinking. It widens our focus and is what spawns creativity.

Leonard Mlodinow, in Elastic, articulates it best:

“In a large body of research one quality stands out above all the others — unlike analytical reasoning, elastic thinking arises from what scientists call “bottom-up” processes. In the bottom-up mode of processing, individual neurons fire in complex fashion without direction from an executive, and with valuable input from the brain’s emotional centers. That kind of processing is nonlinear and can produce ideas that seem far afield, and that would not have arisen in the step-by-step progression of analytical thinking.”

Linear thinking is still needed, of course. It wouldn’t help to continually spawn creative ideas without ever executing them.

The reason non-linear thinking is emphasized is because our society and our businesses are imbalanced toward linear thinking. We’ve become so imbalanced that psychiatrist Iain McGhilchrist thinks there may be societal-wide brain damage:

“A way of thinking which is reductive, mechanistic has taken us over,” said McGilchrist. “We behave like people who have right hemisphere damage.”

But even if we have brain damage, of the likes of Pink Floyd, we still have to move forward.

To move forward in the face of uncertainty is to have a growth mindset, which was the first foundation of growth from part one of this series.

But, as we shift to a growth mindset, it’s important to remember that growth takes time.

Just don’t take your time. ⏳

(This post originated on productology.substack.com)

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Randy Gibson
Randy Gibson

Written by Randy Gibson

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan ___________________ Professional: (productology.substack.com)

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