10x Core Concepts: 1. Growth versus Development
First grow fast in quantity, but then stop, and switch to quality.
[Previous article: 10x Core Concepts — Model thinking for everyone and everywhere]
Tall trees are more likely to take a hit and fall in the thunderstorm.
Elephants have fragile legs.
It is important to have a sense of a good measure and moderate a growth in one domain to start developing and growing in another domain.
What would happen if our bodies never stopped to grow? We would become very fragile, our bones would break and we would die. This happens to people with rare genetic disorder. It also happens to big corporations and empires.
The proper and healthy growth is very important when we are young, but then we stop to grow physically in our twenties and personal development is far more important. It is the same with wealth creation of people, companies and even states.
The growth of GDP is important when a country tries to attain middle income or high income status. But after some critical level of income per capita is reached, the quality of life becomes much more important than the quantity of things, money or connections.
After people reach a certain level of income and become rich, their level of happiness doesn’t grow with additional income. They need to develop in other dimensions, for example in social relationships, community and pursuing their talents and meaning.
In the weightlifting community there is a saying: “Don’t skip a leg day.” It means that you shouldn’t skip days when you exercise your legs. This might be more boring than exercising arms, but it is necessary to keep a balanced body look. So one doesn’t end up with massive arms and tiny legs. This idea of a balanced growth extends to many areas.
This concept of Growth versus Development can be connected to the famous Maslow Pyramid of Needs: from 1. Physical needs — basic needs like food, sleep and shelter, 2. Security and employment, through 3. Social needs like good relationships and 4. Esteem — confidence and achievement, right to the top of 5. Self-actualization where people pursue their talents and seek meaning in life that goes beyond them.
Technology companies today mainly pursue solutions for the first bottom half of the pyramid. And also many people focus on excessive growth in some of the needs in the bottom half, and don’t pay enough attention to the growth in the top half of the Maslow’s Pyramid.
Reconciling Development with Growth
It is important to see growth and development not as opposing concepts, but as two sides of the same coin. We could think about them as fractal concepts, or self-similar concepts. Development is growth, but a balanced growth in many areas. Think of a cauliflower on a picture above. It is self-similar — a part of the cauliflower looks like the whole cauliflower.
For example, one can have a strategy to grow many different skills in a short time, like investing only 20 hours in learning the basics of playing guitar, investing 20 hours in learning the basics of coding and 20 hours in learning French. Basically you could have this strategy for each month if you build a strong will and ability to focus and persevere.
Now you see that there is a clear limit to this strategy, maybe you could play a few songs on a guitar, but then you would run out of songs to impress people with. The same with coding and French. So you realize that you need to select some areas where you want to develop a deeper expertise.
So to develop a quality, you need again an additional quantity
Now this also means basically investing more hours and a focused energy into some skill. So to develop a quality, you need again an additional quantity. For example of more time, or various techniques, or more focus. So now in one skill you are developing various different skills — for example various different techniques of playing guitar, tuning guitar and taking care of it. You might even learn another language just to keep in touch with people who share interest with you in a particular style of play or music.
Growth and a landscape model
Imagine a two peak landscape. One peak is higher and it represents the global optimum — the highest point you can reach in the whole landscape. The other one represents the local optimum. Imagine you are already on that slope and you can go either up or down. The highest point that you can reach locally without going down first is the local optimum.
Now imagine you can write on a computer quite quickly. You can grow your skill by trying to increase the frequency of writing with your current technique. This would be like trying to reach the local optimum — the highest speed of writing with your current technique.
But you heard of this thing called touch-typing, a technique that lets you write much faster and without looking at the keyboard. But to learn that technique, you would need to unlearn your current technique and start from the beginning, letter by letter and finger by finger.
This is painful, but if you invest e.g. 20 hours of your time in this new technique you will learn it. The touch-typing technique is the global optimum for the current landscape — a standard keyboard.
You might object that learning the technique is just too much time and effort and you are quick already, and this is not your priority now. Some older people say the same about using computers — they are ok with writing or calculating by hand.
Now, there is value in learning calculating by hand or writing by hand nicely. For example, when your computer is off, you can still write your notes and let other people read it.
Paper here is an ancient technology but it is still a technology that lets you be much more effective, that e.g. calculating all in your head or remembering all that you wanted to say in your head.
You might say that this particular technique of writing or this particular technology of paper is part of your identity. And you don’t want to get rid of it, even though you know that other techniques and technologies are more effective (produce better results) and more efficient (cost you less time or energy).
This questions of effective learning, unlearning and identity are part of our second concept — Growth Mindset versus Fixed Mindset.
Note: How can we branch out the concept of Growth to other concepts?
This part is a discussion on how to expand on this core concept of Growth versus Development and it also includes a question if another alternative structure could be used — instead of 10x core concepts, we could have a binary tree — “2x Core Concepts” — that would branch out from Growth and Development to other concepts. Or start somewhere else.
Growth seems to be a good candidate to be the first and top concept. And we could create a binary tree that would branch out from the concept of growth, into growth and development, and further into other sub-concepts: competition, cooperation, evolution, design.
This is just an outline of thinking about some fractal binary tree of concepts that starts with the concept of growth:
Then we could elaborate those concepts further. This are just “toy examples” and placeholders for something potentially better:
Competition is about winning and losing.
Cooperation is about equality/win-win, and inequality/(win-lose, lose-lose). I put the lose-lose option under inequality, because although it creates local equality (everybody is worse off) but it creates inequality compared to the global optimum — a higher peek that could be achieved by win-win solutions.
Evolution is about survival/adaptation or extinction.
And Design is about positive feedback and negative feedback loops. A negative feedback loop would halt the excessive growth in one dimension and switched to growth in another dimension.
We see that the concept of Growth versus Development is overarching and related to other 9 Core Concepts and many other mental models. I will add a section to each of the 10x Core Concepts that will shortly compare and connect them to other popular mental models.
I want to also encourage anyone to join this exercise and come up with their own set of 10x or 2x core mental models that can be expanded and might be better. The idea is that if we manage to tackle the really core ideas behind many models that shape our societies and institutions we can give ability to young people and anyone to learn faster and to be able to effectively transfer models from one domain and use them in another domain.
The highest added value I see here is simplifying and reducing mental models further (from 100+ models that e.g. Charlie Munger, Scott E. Page or LessWrong community uses) and creating great stories and perfecting the art of storytelling that can make learning these models engaging and easy for even rural kids in Africa.
Next article: 10x Core Concepts — Growth Mindset versus Fixed Mindset
