On Growth

There is a trite truism that echoes resounding over every self-help blog, the advice of all elders to the youth, and all winners to the would-be competitors. It takes many shapes, “Keep pushing yourself!” “Don’t get bored!” “Never stop learning!” but the core is simple to identify, “Continue becoming more than you are today.”

We spend the first portion of our lives constantly becoming something more than we were. As children, we are the embodiment of growth, nearly bursting at the seams, growing in cognitive, physical, and emotional capacities in all directions at all times. In our earliest portions of our lives, we cannot help but grow, develop, and expand ourselves.

In time, this innate seed of growth slows—we’ve burned through all the goodness and virility of youth—and we must convert the engines of our growth from innate, haphazard combustion to deliberate, engineered, self-propelled machines. This, or else suffer the consequences of being stuck with the same capacities of our early adult lives. The gear of growth whirrs only if you will commit sweat and tears to its operation. Biology alone will carry us forward to maturity, but we must carry ourselves thereafter.

For all the advice and encouragement we are given to grow, we are rarely told how, rarely instructed in the subtle art of growth. In part, this is a useful oversight, since failure is fuel for growth and inevitable if the mechanisms of growth are unknown. But we can do better. We can do so much better.

The rule of growth is simple: homogeneity is a stagnate swamp—heterogeneity is an unknown season. A muscle does not grow until it is put under new strain, and neither does a person grow until they are forced to adapt.

The answer, always, is pressure.