If you put a seed in the ground, and you check it out the next day, there’s nothing there. If you look at it after two days, same, nothing yet. Third day, nada.
Depending on the seed, you may see a tiny sprout only in about a week, or sometimes even after a month.
This is the time to grow.
I find this concept extremely important, especially for long term projects. There is a certain structure needed for a long term project in order to endure. If you rush it out, looking for tangible results very fast, you may alter this structure, and even if you manage to put something together like this, it won’t last. It will be fragile and it will crumble at the first serious storm.
But there is something even more important than this long term structure, and that is your own ability to manage the new world after the long term project is built. Because if it’s an important project, your world will be significantly altered.
For instance, if you move to a different country, or if you launch a business, these are projects that not only require a lot of time (hence, slowly building that skeleton, that structure), but also they require a lot of adjustment from yourself. If you switch countries in a day, you will be simply overwhelmed by all the new stuff that you’ll have to manage. You will be overrun. Similarly, if you wake up one day as the owner of a successful business, you will have no way to know ho to manage it. It will eat you alive, and that’s if you’re not completely destroying it in the first two months.
The time to grow is more about your own growth, than it is about the project. It’s about your capacity to adapt to the new structure around, to understand the new processes and learn how to manage them.
The same seed that you sow in the ground, you sow it in yourself too. You need to slowly learn to understand the tree that will grow, to learn to live with it and take care of it. If you would just wake up with a tree in front of you, you’ll have no idea how to deal with the situation.
So, whenever you start something new, important, and potentially long-term, take care of both seeds: the one you’re planting outside and the one you’re planting inside.
Give them time to grow.
