Do You Want To Grow?
In my journey I have had times where I felt like I had built a rocketship and was just trying to hang on. Ironically, those are the times we’re under the most scrutiny, have the most eyes watching us, and it seems like there’s no way to make everyone happy. I think in those times we have easy options to grow our capacity for complexity and effectiveness.
I’ve also had times where I had no clue how I would get out of such a bad spot -failing business, failing relationships, financial ruin, death, depression. It’s in those times we try to contract complexity and grow internally to manage the emotional turmoil.
Most of the time it’s a little of both and a lot of stuff in the middle that’s hardly worth mentioning - paying bills, spending time on relationships, washing the dishes. It’s in these times we don’t think about growth and yet it’s still an option. It’s in the mundane where if we apply presence our brains go to work in the background processing the bad and building the good. Presence unlocks our subconscious, and self-reflection is how we talk to it.
Combining the two, regularly, creates consistent growth. But why grow? Some people don’t care to grow. I’ve seen it. There’s just no desire for any growth. Things are how they are. Some people just meander through life without looking at it or themselves.
Looking at those people reminds me how much I want to grow. I’ve had times where I stopped caring, any journey into ourselves and/or emptiness I think creates these periods. Looking back on those times, now, I know they’re a part of me….they help me see the difference between drive and park. I think growth is an integral part of fully embracing the human experience.
Life is fucking electric. Life is vibrational and cyclical. It’s an ocean, a wave, and a single particle flying through space/time. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once. Sparing you the lecture of how short of a time we all have I’ll just say I want all of every moment and that feels like the closest I’ll get to immortality.
When I’m not growing I’m not experiencing more of life. Life stalls for me. If I’m not present, that moment quickly disappears into the abyss and is gone for ever. And staying present gets harder as we get older. Our brains want us to fall into routine so it can work less. I want to resist that and constantly challenge my brain. Grow.
At any given time I think we have a particular capacity for complexity. If we’re below the capacity things are easy. If complexity moves beyond our capacity, we feel overwhelmed. The paradox is that the only way to grow it is to play on the edge of it. Convention tells us when we feel overwhelmed to pull back. But if we’re properly applying presence and self-reflection we can quickly figure out what the source is and solve the complexity creating the overwhelm.
Presence is finding the raw signal for growth. Noise like projections or ruminations disappear. It frees up cognitive bandwidth to see and process complexity. Our brain integrates those experiences then self-reflection converts those experiences into patterns for puzzle pieces. We build a library of pieces to be used. Our subconscious, our intuition, can see the pieces before we think about them and present them with very little cognitive load. The result is our capacity for complexity grows.
If we’re lazy with our cycle, we find we don’t have the pieces we need. If we start laying down pieces faster than we can integrate them into our subconscious we create chaos with pieces that don’t fit.
When our capacity for complexity grows, we more clearly see new challenges and create the tools to manage them. Journaling, mind-maps, dashboards, teams, cross-functional collaboration are all tools we can use to help manage greater complexity.
Many more tools are available now and I think the current society’s capacity for complexity is dramatically higher than prior generations. And AI is about to explode available tools. Having digital ‘twins’ as a friend called them recently, that is just like us but knows everything AI knows allows us to fast-track through any challenge that can be solved with the right knowledge leaving only our capacity and desire for growth as our limiting factor.
So, do you want to grow?