Gardening for Great Outcomes (Gestation Period Mental Model)
AI image by Midjourney
Time is an input to any good outcome.
“You can’t grow a tomato in a day.”
Great outcomes take a long time.
“You can’t grow a forest in a year.”
For any goodness or greatness you are pursuing, time is an important ingredient. Often that time is irreducible.
Here is the perfect display of this idea:
“You can't get a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.”
Because of this example, I think of the irreducible time an outcome requires as “The Gestation Period”
To ignore this mental model is to live in a perpetual state of frustrated impatience. Or, to assume various disastrous forms of procrastination in the pillars of a good life.
Ignoring Gestation Periods enables the misguided notion of living life out of balance:
Sacrificing health or relationships for wealth.
Sacrificing wealth on relationships.
Sacrificing relationships on health.
The truth is that all of these domains have gestation periods. They need space and time to develop. You can’t will them to move faster after a certain point. But you can plant the seeds, and water them every day.
To have the optimal life you picture, you want good health, good relationships, and wealth all at once. The only way to have them all at once is to build them all at once.
The only way to build them all at once is to have the patience to allow each of them to grow a bit slower than they might if you focused all of your energy on it.
The key to doing this happily is remembering that they all have Gestation Periods.
You can get a lot further by putting in 3 hours a day each on health, wealth, relationships, and happiness than 12 on wealth every day for 5 years, then moving on to others.
Can't get rich in 2 years by working 12 hour days.
Can't get healthy in one month by working out 6 hours a day.
Can't build a strong relationship in a week by going all-in on therapy.
The Gestation Period has been on my mind often as I work to both build Scribe (the publishing company) and Rolling Fun (our early-stage investing fund) in parallel.
Building a strong business takes years. Assembling the team, establishing the culture, refining products, earning customer trust, growing the reputation, and scaling up all of these functions.
Building a track record in early-stage startup investing takes even longer. Companies can take 10-20 years to exit and distribute to investors. It takes 15 years to build the kind of track record that really gets you in the game. I’m glad I started young (~30) but I must remember to be patient for the outcome. I can be impatient about my inputs (meeting new founders, supporting our companies, and sharing our outlook on an optimistic future through advancing technology).
This is one of my very favorite Naval takes: “Impatience with actions, patience with results.”
We must be impatient to plant the seeds, and patient with their growth.
Remembering we can’t make those tomatoes grow faster… we can only give them the environment necessary to grow as fast as they can.