As someone who has constantly sought out growth in life, I’ve never been good at dealing with plateaus but I may be getting better at it now. The general advice here is “Be Patient” but I think it misses a lot of nuance.

Imagine an S-curve

Early on, you see great growth curve because of the novelty and challenge. As you build more familiarity and muscle of that situation, it starts feeling mundane and rate of growth starts tending towards zero.

A lot of things in life work this way. You enter into a new job or relationship, initially there’s fun and challenge and slowly the mundanity hits. The growth rate is not high anymore, the outcomes are not coming fast anymore, and pace of everything reduces.

At this point, you can do a few things:

1. Push at the same S-curve and try and force some change

2. Reduce your pace (and your expectations of pace)

3. Change the thing you’re doing and find another S-curve to ride

Although there is no right answer here, in my experience, 1st is very hard and rare. May be, you’re running a business whose growth has stalled and now you’re going all in on finding customers from wherever you can. But it can be argued that that is what you should have been doing anyway.

There are not a lot of situations where you can force growth immediately at a plateau. It’s the equivalent of expecting a baby to be delivered in less than 9 months —> things have their own natural pace.

So you are left with 2 and 3.

The choice between 2 and 3 is essentially the choice of who you are.

There are some people who can easily downshift gears without any dissonance and stay that way, and upshift again when the next growth curve hits. Go with the flow perhaps best describes the mindset here.

And there are some others who can’t do the same downshift and change the thing they’re doing to find the next curve. For these people, internal dissonance is minimized as soon as they see the growth and pace again. But the downside to this strategy is you might break compounding if you go too far away from your main thing.

E.g. If you’re bored of your current software engineering job, there are 4 contours here at different level of adjacencies:

1. Do software engineering at a different company which will have different engineering challenges

2. Move to product

3. Become an investor specialized in engg focused companies

4. Become a musician (<insert any hobby here>)

As you go from 1 to 4, the environment becomes more and more different from what you’ve been doing and hence, the compounding benefit of your current skillset reduces. (Side Note: I’d argue that a choice based on intensity and curiosity is the best choice and if that means breaking compounding, so be it, but only if that choice is truly something you can hold up for at least a few years. Might be the equivalent of “Break your piggy bank if necessary, but don’t do it often.”)

This might mean there’s a fourth option here.

Don’t change the thing you’re doing but seek an S-curve somewhere else.

E.g. Side project.

If you really want to be a musician, start producing music on the side and get on that growth curve, this will keep you energized and take away your focus from your main thing. You might argue that it’s not solving the problem of plateauing, but it might — you may hold on to music long enough that you actually become a full-time musician or during that time, your main thing also changes a bit and you might find new energy in it.1

To summarize, if you’re an all-consuming person and can downshift, go for 2, else go for 3 and change your growth curve completely but don’t do it often. And if you can manage your energies on multiple things at once, go for 4.

Wow, so now we have 3 good options to deal with plateaus that are more actionable than “Be Patient”. Pick and choose based on what works with you 🙂