My favourite Ernest Hemingway quote is from the novel “The Sun Also Rises”, where a character is asked, “How did you get bankrupt?”.
His classic reply was “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
The answer describes so many phenomena in life. A relationship breaks down gradually, then suddenly. Our health deteriorates slowly, then suddenly.
We do the same with a failed exam, a demotion, lost market share, bad employee engagement scores, being replaced as the supplier of choice by our biggest client etc.
Our daily behaviours/habits cause a slow decay of a condition, only that it’s not visible yet. One day, the proverbial camel’s back breaks, andsuddenly, the damage is visible.
The same “gradually, then suddenly” principle also applies when striving for success.
We may put in the work for 100 consecutive days, but we may not discern any improvement until day 101. The science of success it seems, is asymmetrical. No quick fixes here. Our daily efforts add up, until one day the cumulative positive effect breaks through visibly.
16 years ago in 2008, I went through a nightmarish 4-month period when equipment that my company had provided a client started crashing intermittently. These outages seemed at first glance to be happening out of the blue. Reality though was that we hadn’t been vigilant enough to ensure that the equipment’s software was up to date. Network performance degraded gradually – which we treated as one-offs – and then suddenly, when a large chunk of the network crashed.
Our way out of the hole we dug ourselves adhered to the same principle. For 4 months every single night, from 2am to 5am when network traffic was low, teams of engineers painstakingly upgraded nodes one at a time, while ensuring minimal service unavailability. Some engineers worked 6 or 7 nights a week for 4 months. Network performance got better gradually, and then suddenly 4 months later, the last node had been upgraded, and the network finally stable.
A gentle reminder to anyone who is mid-way through to a big hairy audacious goal:
Know that success comes gradually, and then suddenly.