Every August, my feed fills up with the same beautiful ritual. Kids on porches. Kids at front doors. Kids holding little chalkboard signs announcing what grade they’re heading into and what they want to be when they grow up. Backpacks that look enormous on a first grader and somehow look small on a kid who was a first grader about ten minutes ago.
And every year, the parents post the side-by-side. Last August next to this August. Same porch, same doorframe, same kid — except not the same kid at all. Two inches taller. New teeth. A haircut they picked out themselves. A look in their eye that says they figured something out over the summer that they’re not going to tell you about.
We do this because growth in kids is impossible to miss when you hold the two pictures next to each other. Day to day, you’d swear nothing was happening. Line up twelve months and it’s undeniable.
Here’s the question I’ve been sitting with this week, and I’ll warn you it’s not a comfortable one.
If someone put a picture of you from last August next to a picture of you today, would anyone be able to tell the difference?
Not your face. Your face is going to do what it’s going to do (let’s save that for another post). I mean the rest of it. Would your thinking look different? Would your business look different? Would you have that look of “I figured something out over the summer”? Would the way you handle a hard conversation, or a slow month, or a client who ghosts you, look different than it did a year ago?
Most of us can’t answer that, and it’s not because we’re lazy. It’s because nobody hands us a chalkboard sign. There’s no first day of fourth grade for a forty-two-year-old business owner. No teacher moves us to the next room. No one tells us we’ve been promoted from “figuring it out” to “actually knows what she’s doing.” We just keep opening the laptop.
So growth becomes optional. And optional things get skipped.
I’ve watched this happen to good people for thirty years. A business owner will spend two hours researching the right chair for their office and zero hours deciding what they want to be better at by next spring. They’ll obsess over a website font and never once ask what skill would change their revenue if they got serious about it. It’s not a character flaw. It’s just that the urgent stuff is loud and the growth stuff whispers.
The kids have an advantage we lost. Their year is built with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Someone assigns them material they don’t already know. Someone makes them do the hard thing in front of witnesses. Someone measures them, tells them how it went, and then moves them up anyway. The whole system is designed to make sure they don’t finish the year the same person they started it as.
You can build that for yourself. It’s just that you have to be the teacher, the principal, and the kid on the porch all at once.
Here’s what that has looked like for me, and it’s simpler than it sounds. Pick one thing. Not five. One thing you’re genuinely not good at that would matter if you were. Maybe it’s asking for the sale without apologizing for the price. Maybe it’s reading your own financials without your stomach dropping. Maybe it’s speaking in front of a room. Then give it a deadline that isn’t “someday,” a real date on a real calendar. And tell somebody. Out loud. To a person who will ask you about it.
That last part is the one people skip, and it’s the one that works. Kids don’t grow in isolation. They grow in a building full of other kids, all of them a little uncomfortable, all of them being watched by people who expect something of them. That’s not pressure. That’s proximity. It’s why our members here at The Village Workspace get more done at a table with four other entrepreneurs than they ever did alone at the kitchen counter or home office, and it’s why the ones who tell somebody what they’re working on are the ones who actually work on it.
So take the picture. Seriously. Stand somewhere you’ll remember, take a photo today, and write down three sentences about where your business is and what you’re afraid of right now. Put it in a folder. Open it next August.
The kids will have grown. The only real question is whether you did too.
Ready to grow next to people who are doing the same? Come see what a day at The Village looks like — your first one’s on us.