You cannot rush growth

What happens when you try to do things too fast- lessons from evolution, investing, writing, fitness and the creative process

“Slow down you’re doing fine. You can’t be everything you want to be before your time”

- Billy Joel

Morgan Housel in his book Same As Ever mentioned how tree saplings spend their early decades under the shade of their mother’s canopy.

A limited amount of sunlight means that the tree can grow only at a limited pace. But if you plant the tree in an open field and allow it access to unlimited sunlight then the tree grows much faster, free from any shade.

This fast growth means that the tree never had enough time to densify and a tree that grows this quickly, rots even quicker and never has a chance to grow old. 

Housel also speaks about two groups of identical baby fish. When you put two baby fish in cold water and the other in hot water respectively, then the fish that is growing in cold water will grow slower than normal and vice versa with the fish in hot water. 

Now put these two fish back into normal water and they eventually converge to become normal, full-size adults. The fascinating part is that the fish with slowed-down growth in their early years go on to live 30% longer than the average and the fish that were in warm water which grew much faster, die earlier than average.

If growth could be rushed and sustained over long periods of time, most people would be successful but sadly it is a slow boring journey and hence most people fail when they attempt to fast-track results.

Even in the fitness world, there is this craze that doing a workout that gets our heart rate pumping and gets us feeling exhausted at the end of a session, and that pushing our bodies beyond its limit is what is going to lead us to that chiseled physique.

I wrote more on this piece in my piece on Boredom.

But what people fail to miss out on is that when you place pressure on the body, it will find a way to adapt or get damaged. The only way to continually make it stronger and build muscle is by gradually increasing the intensity of the load so that your body can recover better the next time.

In fact reducing the number of days I work out has enhanced my progress in a more sustainable manner. The muscle tears when you work out, it recovers and grows when you rest. Tear the muscle too much too often and you will eventually get injured.

If you push the body too fast to achieve a goal, it will react with inflammation, injury, and stress.

This chart from James Clear’s blog encapsulates this idea well through the example of strength training. We need to find a middle ground between A, B, and C. The chart suggests that we need to find a habit that allows us to be reasonably consistent to achieve growth, and I believe that this process extends beyond strength training.

In psychology, this concept is often referred to as the Goldilocks Rule, which involves performing tasks at a 'just manageable difficulty' level. The human brain thrives on challenges, but only when they are within an optimal range of difficulty.

This is why most people burn out in the workplace when they take on more than they can chew in the hope of growth, companies fail when they aim to grow too fast and are not able to sustain that growth, and individuals fail when they push their body too hard in the hope to get stronger and faster within a stipulated time. 

Ernest Hemingway had a great method of being consistent with his writing in that he said that he would always write at 80% intensity so as to not suffer from any kind of anxiety or burnout on arriving for the next day of writing.

Hemingway would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. Instead of exhausting every last idea and bit of energy, he would stop when the next plot point became clear. This meant that the next time he sat down to work on his story, he knew exactly where to start. He built himself a bridge to the next day, using today's energy and momentum to fuel tomorrow's writing. 

This is popularly referred to as the Hemingway Bridge which would eventually compound into a large volume of work.

Jim Collins, in his book How The Mighty Fall, took the example of HP to explain that a company is more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starvation from too little when HP took on more than it could chew in the hopes of growing its company during the dot com boom.

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Take the example of this plant.

https://twitter.com/mihir_patki/status/1675089760413712385?

A plant dies when it is given more water than it needs.

Even something healthy and nourishing can be damaging when you go beyond what you actually need. 

Plants regulate glucose for their survival through the process of photosynthesis.

During photosynthesis plants take in CO2 through the water to get their dose of glucose and excess CO2 through that additional water becomes harmful to the plant by providing the plant more glucose than it needs.

The plant will eventually wither and die with this excess glucose, it needs just the right amount of water provided consistently to grow gracefully.

In the same way that humans provide more glucose through excess calories which eventually leads to chronic disease.

One of my favorite writers who I often take inspiration from

Isabel

explained this process of not rushing the creative process through the example of a baker.

A baker never bakes the entire dough in one sitting, she needs to 'work and wait' by sprinting and resting.

If she slogs on the dough all day, she will be left with a tough, overworked product that doesn't have the light, flaky airness of something that was just allowed to be, to rise to its full potential.

Just like this article, had I forced myself to release it, I would probably have created a subpar piece that I wouldn’t be proud of. Instead, I took my time by dedicating pockets of time in the morning over two weeks to complete it.

Recently, I finished reading an insightful book on Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. It explains how forcing ideas in meetings or for any projects can be problematic. Forte introduces the concept of the "slow burn" and "heavy lift," which explains how consistently taking notes at your own pace improves the quality of your work and meetings rather than forcing yourself to produce ideas in single sessions.

Heavy Lift

You go for a ‘brainstorming session’ or a ‘meeting’ without having prepared notes for it and hence you have to force your ideas hence the quality of the meeting becomes poor and no one walks out with credible ideas.

Thus defeating the entire purpose of brainstorming to generate ideas.

Slow Burn

Slowly take down notes over days or weeks in preparation allowing yourself to enter a conversation like brewing a delicious pot of stew brewing over the stove. This adds more quality to a meeting, negates recency bias, and ensures that ideas are not forced.

For most of us corporate office employees, meetings sometimes come out of the blue, hence this process may never be linear throughout our careers, reinforcing the idea of constantly taking notes to ensure a constant progress of ideas and being ready with quality ideas for any meeting.

Conclusion

And that’s how the best work, the best relationships, and the best kind of growth happens—by not rushing it beyond its capacity and accepting that some things take time.