Choosing to Grow

THE third choice is to grow, to try to live and work to the limit of one's potential, right up to the end of one's life. Once launched upon a career, the great hazard to successful people is in their late thirties and forties when they may have developed good competence in their chosen field: they, have learned to deal with the competitive pressures, and they have acquired some feeling of security. The temptation to which many succumb is to choose to sign off and ride it through to retirement on the competence and the claims to security they then have. Time was when men and women could get away with this choice, and some did. In the present rapid pace of the world, no level of competence, however high, is likely to be good for twenty-five years. Even parents may find an unbridgable gap in maturity with their children if the parents sign off at forty or forty-five, and if their children continue to grow with the pace of this fast-moving world. I have seen too many tragic instances of this. Children will forgive many errors of their parents (and it is a good thing they do because we all commit plenty of them). But the child who moves to a high level of maturity at an early age is not likely to forgive the parent who, in middle life, could have chosen continued growth but chose, instead, to level off. There is no nice comfortable plateau of achievement that one can sit on comfortably from middle life to the end. The choices at that point are clearly up or down, growth or decay. One must make some growth effort just to stay even. The demands of growth are rigorous and exacting, but the rewards are exciting in today's world. I found some interesting challenges awaiting me when I retired last year, and I had them only because I made some difficult growth choices when I was forty.