Sometimes people look back, summarizing their life, or forward, projecting their life. If you’re really type-A, you’ve imagined your life as a graph once or twice. If you’re idealistic, or just a perfect person, you’ve imagined it like a straight line, up and to the right.
What seems more realistic is a line that bounces up and down erratically and eventually gets somewhere up and to the right by either luck or hard work.
A model that I think is both realistic and helpful to conceptualize is one where you sprint, jump, then repeat. It looks like a staircase (see below).
To start out, you’re sprinting. You just need to get farther along, so you put your head down and run as fast as you can. Then you have an opportunity to jump up to the next level. The key to cutting years off your growth here is: how high can you jump? Maybe you can skip one or two steps. But then you’re sprinting again, to get to the next opportunity for a jump.
The sprints are execution and hustle: the what, chopping at the roots. Once you’ve gotten to a step and decided that’s the one, you’ve just gotta go. If you try jumping up from there, there will be nothing to grab onto, no matter how high you jump. The distance that needs traveling is horizontal and it’s all about sprinting.
The jumps are about strategy and purpose: the why, surveying above the treetops. These are times to take a deep breath and think about what’s important to you. Talk to mentors who have been through it before. Visualize and weigh your different options.
The synergy between the two is when you jump high into a big enough challenge that you can start sprinting on something that you care about, motivating you to hustle and execute as fast and hard as possible. Your why speaking fluently to your what. Your treetop surveying making sure your chopping in the right forest.