Morgan Housel, whose writing is increasingly becoming most sought after for me, shared this wonderful little paragraph from a book called ‘The Secret Wisdom of Nature‘:
In undisturbed ancient forests, youngsters have to spend their first two hundred years waiting patiently in their mothers’ shade. As they struggle to put on a few feet, they develop wood that is incredibly dense. In modern managed forests today, seedlings grow without any parental shade to slow them down. They shoot up and form large growth rings even without a nutrient boost from added nitrogen. Consequently, their woody cells are much larger than normal and contain much more air, which makes them susceptible to fungi—after all, fungi like to breathe, too. A tree that grows quickly rots quickly and therefore never has a chance to grow old.
It is such a powerful lesson. Going viral, making headlines, or getting too much hype in a short span of time will mostly end up being negative. For example, Prithvi Shaw is a young Indian cricketer. He played too well to be unnoticed at a very young age such that the media and some Cricketers hyped him up to be the next Sachin Tendulkar. I doubt if he would’ve said something like that himself but that hype might have affected him in some manner. Now when the time and opportunity came, he blew it by getting out on 0 and 4 runes in India Australia Test Match.
We judge too quickly and put people either on a high pedestal or totally ruin their confidence by putting them down. Social Media adds fuel to the fire. The people who are the real deal are still sweating it out. They are still burning the midnight oil. They are still trying to get better at their game. They don’t care about the hype. They want to be so strong at their roots that no wind or storm can sway them off.
Photo by Zach Reiner on Unsplash
