#00 - An Uncomfortable Journey

Written By GLC

Hello everyone and welcome to the Leadership Sketches Newsletter. I'm Gianluca Cinquepalmi and for over 20 years I've been working in the design, innovation, and leadership field.

An Uncomfortable Journey

There are several things I'm self-conscious about. Of course, my physical appearance, like many of us. Also, I don’t like so much my smile. But there is one thing that I've always been even more self-conscious, since I was a kid. My handwriting. And also, my ability to sketch.

This got even worse because all my career I was surrounded by fantastic illustrators, designers, photographers, and artists!

I felt uncomfortable writing by hand. So, I tended to use other tools…

…until now.

This time I said: «Let me see if I can push through. What if I could find a way in which this is functional? »

And that’s why Leadership Sketches is born. I will exercise my handwriting and sketching skills while you’ll receive a weekly digest on leadership.

So… what’s the topic today?

We’ll talk about growing and a couple of wrong perceptions we have about growing.

The question is: how do we grow? and why growth most of the time feels uncomfortable? This is something that I discuss extensively in our creative Leadership Masterclass, the concept of perception of growth.

So, we draw a simple graph and we put in the vertical axis ‘value’, and in the horizontal axis ‘time’.

Now imagine drawing growth on this line. Growth of any type. Done?

Have you imagined it like this?

This is the normal growing concept. And… this is wrong!

We believe that a certain amount of effort or time will result in a certain amount of value. The reality is that growth doesn't really work this way most of the time. Organic growth is exponential. So, what does it mean? It means that we keep on practicing until there is an inflection point. This inflection point is where things change.

And this is also what is called the Compound Effect. And when we reach this moment, something changes and we start growing, and growing and growing exponentially until we reach whatever desired result we want.

Now the hard part is that this process is extremely uncomfortable. The problem is that we don't really see the growth in the first place. We only see that we are progressing little by little.

And usually in the first part of the process we gave up.  But we must push through... Because we are here, we must develop; we must compound our knowledge. We must find ways to rethink the way we used to do things.

So, I want to leave you with this question.

What uncomfortable journey would you like to embark on if you want to become sustainably better?

Because this is what Creative Leadership is all about: our ability to rethink our leadership model so that we can obtain real growth and sustainable growth.

As usual, I'm Gianluca Cinquepalmi. This is Leadership Sketches. And until the next sketch, don't forget: Inspire, Challenge, and Disrupt.