Good and Bad Growth

Good Growth

The good growth in this world is quality, not quantity. Growth in knowledge. Growth in understanding. Growth in diversity. Inner growth in all its forms.

Bad Growth

The bad growth is almost exclusively all the ‘quantity’ stuff we’ve been doing up til now..Growth in consumerism, waste and emissions. Rampant and growing overpopulation. Growing concentration of corporate ownership. Massively overgrown corporate, sovereign and household debt. Growing wealth concentration. Growing inequality. Economic growth shouted from the rooftops as the measure of success.. Anyone of a reasonable age will tell you that things have gotten worse not better through these kinds of ‘growth’ over the past several decades.

An Opportunity

Even in an age of disruption and automation where 50% of jobs are likely to be turned over to machines in the next couple of decades, there’s actually no need to conform to the traditional “growth” definition of success.

This current boom is an opportunity to do things differently, not to disrupt overbloated incumbents just to become the next monolith through new technology, but to recreate the diversity that has gone missing in a single generation.

Material growth is an obstacle..Personal growth and connection to purpose is an opportunity.

What do we do with growth in disruption and automation, using ‘good growth’ to our advantage? A few personal observations:

Inspiration beats motivation every time

“Motivation” is a force with an external locus of control (eg from a “coach”).

Inspiration, on the other hand comes from purpose and passion and therefore has an authenticity and POWER that no amount of motivation can supplant.

Inspiration is an inside job, ie. It has an internal locus of control.

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, all of your thoughts break their bonds…dormant forces and talents come alive and you discover yourself to be a greater person, by far, than you’ve ever dreamt yourself to be” (Patanjali)

Embrace and celebrate failure

People that I hang out with have often share a joke that we’re going to start the next big thing of “Founder Rehab” because it’ll be a boom trend.

As the 90% startup failure rate combines with the relentless drive for thousands more startup “entrepreneurs” — who are only allowed to be positive and full of self-belief needed to convince customers and investors to hand over the moulah — and they hit the rocks (having spent their job payouts or redundancies on becoming entrepreneurs) we need to…

Be open about anxiety, depression and fear of failure.

It’s part of every life journey and challenge. Just pushing it down causes mental, and eventually, physical illness.

Having lost a loved one to cancer after her long battle with mental illness, I know the stigma associated with talking about failure, anxiety and depression. And I know the devastating consequences of not talking about it.

Jane often joked that if she had a physical illness it’d be a lot easier to relate to others. Then she got one of the worst, and now she’s gone.

This always reminds me that..

Life is short.

We are ‘human beings’ NOT ‘human doings’.

Let’s own all our feelings, good and bad, and not be afraid to share. The self-development industry has a lot to answer for if it thinks blowing sunshine up people’s asses the whole time to the exclusion of bad feelings is the answer to everything. Balance in everything — life and feelings!

Slow is the new fast

Taking time out to do nothing improves mental clarity. Buddhists have known this for 2,500 years. Maximum expansion followed by maximum contraction, it’s a cycle of nature, and humans are a part of the natural cycle, and taking regular downtime expands our dynamic range, allowing us to be far more productive than killing ourselves with endless 12–18 hour days. Often times..

Less is more

Less news, less social media, digital detoxes, no mobile phone reception is a good thing. We have the cognitive capacity to make a certain number of quality decisions daily — I think the number is 50 (read Daniel J Levitin’s The Organised Mind) — beyond that the quality suffers and we make crap decisions.

We can choose to spend our limited quota of quality daily decisions either on:

A) what post or tweet to tap, or;

B) what life or business decision to make..

It’s an either or, we get to choose.

If it’s a business coach that you think is the answer, it’s worth remembering that..

‘Thought leaders’ and coaches are not gurus

There are a plethora of business coaches out there who have been in, or grown a successful business themselves. While there are plenty of good motivators out there who have only read books and now teach and give talks as ‘thought leaders’, very few of them will beat those that have also ‘been there and done that’.

If you want to start or grow a successful venture, better to take coaching or advice from someone who has done it before themselves: practitioners. And if it’s a mentor, best one that believes in inspiration and purpose, a mentor in the life stuff, not only business.

The wrap

Growth seems and feels like a pretty good marker of human and societal evolutionary success; But :

1. More ‘stuff’ is never a solution to an inner problem, and
2. More quantitative growth is rarely a solution to a societal one

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell’ (Edward Abbey)

Time has shown us again and again that scale and growth comes at the cost of destruction of diversity every time.

Material growth is the obstacle.. The real opportunity is personal growth and connection to purpose.

Our innovation ecosystem should reflect that..built from the bottom up, for the communities that we want to live in, and with inspiration, purpose and passion for positive change driving it; Not fear of disruption, and not people and organisations who tinker at the edges of a paradigm shift they barely understand.