“Great managers are never satisfied with only a gradual, slow, natural improvement curve. They want and expect, and measure, and verify noted improvement in certain areas. The kind of improvement that cant happen without specific, narrow effort, and a sustained bit of attention, and 3, 6, 9 months worth of work to improve oneself. You’re not going to coast upward if you’re working for a highly effective manager.”
-Manager Tools The Management Trinity Part 3
Coasting upward is not really something you hear about a lot. Certainly in physics, things slow down if they’re coasting uphill. But real life isn’t physics. You can improve yourself by coasting. If you’re in school, you can stroll into a 2.0 GPA and by the end of the semester you’ll be more knowledgeable. Not a lot, but you’ll know more than when you started. Where will this get you? Not to your dreams, that’s for sure. Everyone talks about their dreams and goals and how awesome it’s going to be when they get there, but a small percentage of them put in the specific, narrow, sustained effort and they’re the ones who are changing the world. You can coast up into maybe 10% of your goal, but nobody gets excited about that.
In school, you are your own manager. At the end of the day, the amount you improve is up to you. You need to demand of yourself marked growth. Luckily, there’s a pretty easy way to track this in academia: grades. If you generally average a B, then an A shows that you’ve effectively managed yourself and grown faster than you would naturally. Don’t fall into the trap of making “Graduate with at 3.5″ your only goal, though. Write out your life goals and find out what you need to do to get there. Chances are that they’ll require a bit more than a diploma. Take the breakdown of those goals and find ways to measure it so you can keep yourself on track.
Manage yourself well! Be demanding! Give yourself feedback! Sit down and reassess your progress regularly! You’re not going to be who you want to be if you don’t, and nobody else is going to do it for you.
I always hear a lot of people saying that you should just have slow and gradual growth rather than explosive growth (mostly online) but I don’t really agree. I know you might have trouble managing it long term and have some growing pains but I think you just deal with it and manage it as it comes along. The hardest thing when you are a small company is looking at the slow growth, sometimes you just don’t have time for that and it is better suited to big companies with deep pockets!