Invisible Growth Doesn’t Mean It’s Dead

I’ve been running – for the first time in my life.

The endorphins are pretty nice.

But I think what I like most is the feeling that I can DO things. I can decide I want to do something – something hard that people have told me not to, that they couldn’t do – and just start doing it. And make it work.

Much like writing. I let myself hide for years behind all of the voices who told me it probably wouldn’t work.

It feels amazing to be writing. And running. I feel more alive than I have in decades.

And… my knee is starting to hurt. Intense running makes it worse.

But I don’t want to stop.

Likewise, with writing, I’ve seen a few friends quit recently. It feels like a hard season. I’ve been struggling to find new direction too.

So what is required of us, when things get hard, but we don’t want to stop? How do we respect the ebb and flow of growth while sustaining the momentum?

Growth Sometimes Looks Like the Opposite

We want to think that growth is linear… like a dot on a line graph, moving steadily upward.

But in real life, in three dimensions, growth and progress don’t move that way.

We all know about teenage growth spurts. A kid can hover at a certain height for a few years, and then all of a sudden shoot up in a few months.

Language learning works the same way. A toddler who has just added a bunch of new vocabulary words often gets worse at pronouncing everything for a few weeks. Or if he’s started adding longer sentences, he might revert to building them out of simpler words for a while.

Or a child learning to write more complex stories is likely to have worse handwriting, spelling, and punctuation while he’s learning to make his ideas flow.

Much like muscle growth – when you work a muscle, it gets weaker for a while as it gets stronger.

When you are learning one skill, it often makes you temporarily worse in others as you integrate.

Trees, Roots, and Invisible Progress

Trees offer another way growth does not show up the way we expect.

It’s fall right now. The birch trees are a blaze of gold, every breeze brings down a whirlwind of leaves, and things are getting cold.

But that doesn’t mean the trees aren’t growing – it’s just not where you can see it.

In early fall, many trees turn their attention to their roots. They stretch deeper, instead of taller, into the soil that will sustain them through hard times.

Strong roots give them better access to water and nutrients, help them weather heavy wind storms, and keep them alive through bitter cold winters.

Like us, they move in cycles, and know there is a time for growing in different ways.

Cycles of Creative Life

Life moves in cycles. It expands in the spring, grows steadily in the summer, bears fruit and retracts in the fall, hibernates in the winter.

Likewise, humans often expand in the morning, grow through the day, retract in the evening, and hibernate overnight.

We don’t always do the same intensity or type of growth all the time – it changes.

Cycle changes can be triggered by actual seasons.

They can be triggered by changing conditions. There have been seasons of my life when I’ve had to move, take care of a baby, or add more work that have radically rearranged my priorities, and I’ve had to kill projects that I cared about to sustain others.

We even change in the course of a day: you expand into a work project, reach a difficulty you can’t solve, and step back to rest for the evening.

It’s natural for us to exercise different muscles in this process.

If your brain can’t write today, it could be you need better food, more sleep, a nice walk, to have the difficult conversation, to read something.

The tension here, of course, is the risk that – if you accept the clouded mind, the pull of some other shiny thing, the temptation to stop for just another day – it will become a full rout.

The resistance will win. You’ll risk quitting the exercise or the writing for months, or years, or forever.

How Do We Respect the Cycle and Keep Going?

So this calls for a two-part solution.

On one hand, we need to rest tired muscles, rebuild damaged cartilage, and grow our minds, hearts, and environments in ways that support our chosen area of progress.

On the other hand, we have to find real ways to keep going. Ways to tick the “I did it today” boxes, to maintain the momentum, sustain the progress, and keep the promise to ourselves not to quit.

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Running Supports

So what does it look like to build related skills to sustain a project long-term?

For running, I ordered a knee brace. I learned different stretches. I’m testing different ways of moving to see if they help.

I’ve learned there is a whole ecosystem of people who love to run and are trying to manage injuries and joint pain so they can keep doing it. They all need the knowledge and support to sustain the project.

At the same time, I’m still running, but less often. Only once or twice a week to give myself more recovery time.

In the meantime, I’ve upped other exercises, like yoga, to keep up the momentum and build related muscle groups.

An Internal Metric for Writing

Reading, walking around, talking about what you’ve read – all are probably the best supports I know for the mental aspect of writing.

But what about the emotional aspect?

I don’t really have a goal for running, but to have fun. But for writing, I absolutely have dreams that it would hurt to fail at.

It’s a long walk into the unknown, with no promise of return.

So instead of focusing on that, maybe it’s more about finding the success today. In the feeling of sitting down and typing something. The flow of ideas.

Maybe it’s about how YOU grow as a person, each time you sit down and put in the reps. About a skill you build, or a way you learn to think.

Maybe it’s about how lucky you are to have a dream. A goal. A project you’re building worth sacrificing for.

Maybe it’s about learning what you love and caring enough to keep feeding the fire.

Goals for Root-Growth

Is that a “Why”?

I honestly hate all the “find your why” advice. It feels flat and unmotivating to me.

Maybe this is more like a “How I become a better human in the process”.

Maybe we can list the things we do – that are most helpful for making us better humans – through the process of showing up and doing the thing.

My range of daily goals might look like:

• Read for 30 minutes

• Talk out an idea

• Notes on ideas

• Plan notes or posts

• Writing or voice notes for 30 minutes

• Journaling

• 5 Substack comments

• Read and chat with friends on Substack

• Skill-building work

• Review/niching/goal evaluation

I’m not going to do all of that every day (or any day, really), but doing 3 is progress.

Writing, if you’re a writer, is the ultimate needle mover. So that has to be daily. But we can lower the standards quite a bit.

Put down words. Even if it’s only for a few minutes. Even if they’re bad.

But honoring all the other ways we grow too, besides just putting words on a page, is how we sustain steady progress.

Pick a few from the list and make that the goal.

And write down a few every day, so you can see your progress, and you don’t confuse root-growth with failure.