To overcome stagnation, find the child within

In my last week at Coursera, someone asked me, “What’s something from the early days of Coursera that you wish the company could retain as we scale?”. I couldn’t come up with a great answer, so I’ve been thinking about it. My answer - revive the sense of childlike wonder and possibility around the company’s mission. I find this analogy useful for thinking about companies and about life.

Companies and children evolve their aspirations in similar ways as they grow up. As a kid, the world is your oyster. You want to be a painter, an astronaut, a footballer, an entrepreneur. In college, that dream narrows into something a bit more practical. The painter wants to become a UX designer, the astronaut now wants to become an engineer, the entrepreneur a management consultant. A few years into your job, you narrow your aspiration even more. You’re now focused on getting promoted from L5 to L6, or making the leap from IC to manager, principal to partner. Once you have ascended the ranks and plateaued in terms of titles, ambition narrows further to just compensation.

Startups evolve similarly. A startup that’s just getting started wants to disrupt their industry and change the world. As they succeed, the day to day focus narrows from changing the world to getting the next customer or closing the next funding round. Successful companies are preoccupied with achieving unicorn status, increasing exit valuations or meeting Wall Street’s expectations. Eventually, like individuals, they reach a plateau.

There is nothing innately wrong with narrowing focus, but this is often accompanied by the feeling of hitting a wall, low emotional well-being and regret for the roads not taken. The most successful companies and people both avoid this trap and retain their childlike wonder and imagination. How do they do this?

Most growth in new technologies and startups follows what’s known as an S-curve. There is a long period of slow growth, followed by a period of hyper-growth and eventual maturity and stagnation. It looks like the chart below.

Source: https://innospective.net/why-s-curves-are-probably-the-most-important-concept-in-entrepreneurship/

Successful companies stack consecutive S-curves¹ to maintain their growth. Consider Facebook. It started with photo sharing and profiles; first just for colleges, then high schools, then everyone. Then came international, the mobile revolution, and the Newsfeed. Once they reached everyone, they added Marketplace, Groups, Watch. Each of these new products grew slowly at first, then experienced hyper-growth and then matured. The next product was always ready to take over before the previous one matured.

An individual’s career growth follows the same S-curve. A lot of people intuitively understand this concept of stacking S-curves for personal growth. They hop from job to job to find increasing vectors of growth in their income or status. Their career graph might look like this -

But there’s a problem with this. As they ascend up this steep trajectory in pursuit of income and status, many people find themselves unhappy. In a famous 2010 study, Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton found that beyond a certain point, more income does not lead to higher emotional well-being. In other words, the relationship between money and happiness roughly follows an S-curve.

The results from the famous $75000 happiness study. Source: https://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489#results

The wisdom of the ancient philosophical systems from the Stoic philosophers to the Bhagavad Gita is consistent with this research. The central message of the Bhagavad Gita is to pursue your work, karma, without worrying about the fruits of your labor. In 49 A.D. Seneca, in a letter on the shortness of life, warned the reader against the folly of pursuing external reward -

The condition of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who labour at preoccupations that are not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their walk by the pace of another. If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own. And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life. They will waste all their years, in order that they may have one year reckoned by their name. Some, when they have crawled up through a thousand indignities to the crowning dignity, have been possessed by the unhappy thought that they have but toiled for an inscription on a tomb.

Pursue flow instead of outcome

Consider a video game like Candy Crush. It starts out really easy. as you master the game’s tricks and skills, the levels get progressively more difficult . The challenge always just slightly exceeds your skill level, which makes it extremely addictive. In his seminal book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this the flow state, where experience matches skill and you are constantly learning. Flow is the key to “optimal experience”. Games, sports and hobbies are all designed for constant, linear and sustained skill acquisition, which is what makes them so rewarding.

More importantly, Mihaly identified people who developed what he calls an autotelic personality. An autotelic person has the ability to transform mundane tasks into opportunities for learning and creative expression. They are extremely curious about their surroundings and turn that curiosity into a never-ending game of learning. This trait, he posits, is the key to finding flow in work and life.

This is how children approach the world. Infants convert mundane skills into autotelic goals, repeat them over and over again till they achieve mastery, and then move on to a slightly more complex task. Their learning curve eventually looks like a series of S-curves, each building on the former. The first shape my 1-year old knew was a sphere. She never tired of putting a little ball through the circular hole in her toy. Then she moved on to putting a round cylinder through a circle ad nauseam, then a coin through a slot, and then a square, rectangle, star and so on. Now she’s able to leverage all those skills to play with stacking blocks.

And therein lies one of the secrets of childlike wonder. Instead of being intensely driven by goals and outcomes, children are joyfully motivated by the process of skill acquisition. They are intensely engaged in a process of iteration after iteration until they’ve mastered the skill and move on to the next one. 

Takeaway: Reframe the primary focus from goals and outcomes to skill growth. Develop the ability to be intensely curious and make learning opportunities feel like a game.

I’m intrigued by this concept of childlike wonder. In future parts of this series, I’ll explore the how social conditioning and biology impact our sense of childlike wonder over time, and how we should think about our portfolio of skills. If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to get notified when I publish those.

Thanks to Varun Kishore, Leith, Melanie and Sanyukta for their feedback on drafts of this, and to Olwen for asking the question.

1. For an excellent overview of S-curves, click here.