The Exponential Growth of Life.
By the time I published this article, I probably had less than 200 total views of my 12 published stories.
“Whew, this is crazy!” I said to myself as I ponder what I am going to do next with my Medium page.
I remembered a quote I saw from Sinem Günel’s article about 10 quotes from Confucius:
“ It Does Not Matter How Slowly You Go as Long as You Do Not Stop”
And yes, I am not going to stop, but all the little voices inside me keep asking the same questions: “When will all of my writings yield a nice sum of cash?”, or a more conservative “When will I start attracting people to see my articles?”.
Have you experienced this? The kind of pain you feel when all your struggles feel like it doesn’t change anything? Turns out that is the way life works, and it can be easily explained by the “exponential growth of life”.
Life is All About Exponential Growth
When you work on something, you don’t always sow what you’ve planted right away. Life doesn’t work in a linear manner, where one success leads to another success, which adds up to generate more and more success.
Instead, it is built on a long time of stagnation, a time when you continuously try to improve yourself, to no avail. You keep on going on and going on, hoping that someday you will ultimately make it. One day, your hard work yielded a little bit of fruit, but you will be surprised because it’s not just a single fruit of success, but a massive and massive amount of fruits that you accumulated through that painstaking stagnation.
If you understand the graph of life, you will know why you face the stagnation stage where all your hard work seems to bore no fruit.
That, above, is the graph of life. The blue line is how most people think life should be, and I admit I too did think it was the way life works. But life works in an exponential manner, where compounding of skills can yield into an “explosive growth”, just as What Einstein said:
“the power of compound interest the most powerful force in the universe”
Alwyn Cosgrove, author and fitness guru, said that growth to life requires investments, and this investment will pay off later on as you add more and more to the investment. It sorts of growing like compound interest. The more you put effort into the initial efforts that you have placed on life, the more explosive the growth will be in the future.
So why wouldn’t you think the same? Why would you ignore the exponential way of life and continue seeing it as a linear line, just as most ordinary people do?
Success Are Garnered by the People Who Go Through the Stagnation Stage
Now, looking back at the “growth curve” of life, do you think that people who abandon their hard work before it pays off are the ones who can find the way to succeed in life?
A lot of people gave up way too early, just at the point when their exponential life-growth was at the stagnation stage. The curve was still at its flattest point, but it is slowly rising. Yet, they thought that all their hard works at honing their skills and improving their life yielded no result, so they gave up. They surrendered just before the graph started to peak.
This is the ultimate fallacy to life. When people learn something and they can’t see themselves improve straight away, they give up, thinking that the craft they are trying to improve is not for them.
Humans tend to fall to short-term thinking, and we always crave instant gratification. That is natural, and part of how our brain works. However, if we continue to let this fallacious feature of ourselves dictate the way we live our life, chances are we’ll never maximize our potential to the full extent.
Instead, we are god-gifted with the ability to think and ponder. “What life should be, and how we should act to improve ourselves?”. The answer is clear, the exponential growth of life. If we hang on to our craft just a little bit longer, persevere, and properly manage our natural tendency towards instant gratification, then we are heading for success.
Now, What Should We Do?
I already wrote a long explanation of what we should do. Hang on to the process of improving our life, stop the urge to think that “this will not work”, and continue the hard work you are doing towards improving your life.
Meanwhile, I will continue writing more stories and trying to get it into a publication. This one probably will fail too, but as I said, it’s not only about succeeding right now, it’s about developing myself more and more.
And, if you’re having the same problem, please do the same. If you have any other problems you sought to improve but you haven’t seen the result of the progress, just continue. Remember the exponential growth of life.
Someday, all the struggles you commit will bear its fruits, and the size of it will surprise you.
