As we said in our previous blog, we’re going to dedicate the next few posts to our thinking on the topic of Growth. But we have a slightly different take on Growth than the conventional way of thinking.
To put it simply, Growing only helps in the short term.
That may sound like a backwards statement coming from a group of fellow business owners. Like you, we don’t have a business because we had nothing better to do. We started our business because we wanted to build something, to grow something.
What we would argue though is that collectively as a business community we’ve developed a bit of a fetish with the idea of growth. We define the successfulness of our businesses and our lives based on how much we accumulate, how much we build, how much we enlarge, how much we grow.
It’s not just small business owners who think this. It’s a mindset that has invaded our global institutions. We’re guilty of this on a planetary level. Humans seem to have a continuous, undisciplined desire to always want more, even if it means exhausting our resources. There’s another organism in the world that does the exact same thing. It’s called cancer. It continually spreads, always “wanting more”, until it eventually kills itself, because it has killed its host.
The point here is that we need to stop thinking of Growth as the cure to all of our business, and life, problems. We need a new way of thinking.
Here’s a thought to leave you with, and it will be our next blog’s core idea: Growth is more of what you already have. It can be more of the good, but it’s also more of the bad. Are you OK with that?
