Watering Your Lawn

We are wired to think in linear terms. A little bit more effort yields a little bit more reward. Incremental returns for incremental investment. If I sacrifice a little more today, I will benefit a little more tomorrow. But that isn’t how life works and it messes with our feeble human minds.

Outcomes in real life are rarely linear. Think of an aspiring doctor who goes to school for a better part of a decade before becoming a physician. But she hasn’t “made it” yet. She must now enter residency where she will work 100 hours a week for what is effectively minimum wage. Then, all of the sudden, she will sign a contract for what could potentially be several hundred thousand dollars a year in salary and may earn more in the next twelve months than she did in the previous decade combined. Years of incremental sacrifice and effort with a balloon payoff.

Or consider technology. How many thousands of years did it take to produce the chariot? And how many thousands more between the chariot and the automobile? Yet, just a few decades after the automobile was a common sight, men were walking on the surface of the moon.

Life doesn’t walk, it crawls and then leaps. And sometimes that crawl appears as if there is no movement at all. Just a couple weeks ago we had some new lawn hydroseeded. For two weeks I watered it, sometimes twice a day, and saw no progress. No new growth … at least not for the grass, I did see a couple weeds though. Then one morning, after a couple weeks of nothing, little baby blades of grass shot up through the dirt. Thousands of them. Now we have fresh, green grass covering what looked like just a bunch of dirt a few days ago.

When we don’t see the incremental proof of progress, we get discouraged. Sometimes change course. Sometimes we quit. What would have happened if I cleared out all that dirt after a week of seeing no results and started the process over again? I would be forever reseeding my lawn.

Progress often comes in spikes and surges after what seems like stagnation. Stay patient. Stay disciplined. And keep watering your lawn.

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