Expect No Shortcuts
Updated: Apr 7, 2021
In agile, everything’s attainable. It just depends on the effort you put in.
To practice athletic ability, you need to identify as an athlete. To practice agility, you need to identify as agile.
Like athletic ability, you can have degrees of agility. It’s like exercise or practicing muscle groups. Your ability can come and go. If you’re an athlete who stops working out, you’ll lose your muscles.
The journey is an essential part of growth.
The good news is, if you still identify as an athlete—if you embody the persona of an athlete; if you’re in the athletic-being state—you’ll bounce back. Like riding a bike, when you learn it once, you’re good, but you can always get better. This journey is an essential part of the growth mindset.
And it is a journey of being and doing. Be patient and enjoy it.
Being agile isn’t something you have or don’t have. It’s something you get better at with effort. And even though there are things that’ll help, there are no shortcuts to hard work motivated by mindset. For an athlete, that’s the athletic identity: Who they are. For a company that’s customer-centric, fighting hard for your customer is just who they are. If you care deeply enough, the hard work doesn’t even feel like hard work.
You get better and better, because you’re putting in effort. You become more and more who you are.
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