the power of quiet, unseen work done in the dark

"Do not despise these small beginnings, for the LORD rejoices to see the work begin."

Zechariah 4:10

"I want you to know in your bones that your only path to success is through a continuum of mundane, unsexy, unexciting, and sometimes difficult daily disciplines compounded over time."
Darren Hardy

Maggie Smith said,

"Praise the roots of the plant

- what grounds it and allows it to grow 
- not only the flower.

Without quiet, unseen work happening in the dark, nothing would open in the light."

All the fruit we want in our lives comes from the slow, patient work of tending to the roots. But this is easier said than done.

Most of us resist quiet, unseen work that happens in the dark. But the compound effect of caring for the roots determines what kind of soil we will be. The difference between the hard, shallow, thorny, and good soil was the depth and health of the roots. Root work compounds over time. 

One of the books that had the greatest impact on Nate and me during the Primal Path was The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. It argues that it’s the small, almost unnoticeable things that have the largest impact on our lives. 

Not all at once, not even in ways we can really measure, until suddenly, the compound effect kicks in, and we reap the 100x fruit of a thousand smaller decisions.

Tend to the roots, and the fruit will take care of itself. 

Think about how we use the spare minutes of our days, for example. 

Ten Minutes a Day is…

Seventy Minutes a Week. 
300 Minutes a Month.
Sixty Hours a Year.

How many of you would like to pray for 60 hours this year yet feel like you can’t pray for an hour? Ten minutes daily, tending to the root of your relationship with God, would make it possible.

How many of you would like to be able to make a significant gift to a cause you care about but feel like that’s financially impossible?

If you took the typical 5-dollar-a-day coffee purchase and invested it with an 8 percent return over 20 years, it would come out to around $90,000.

Feels like nothing in the moment, but it’s significant over time.

But you probably know that already. 

At this point in the email, you are probably thinking, "I have heard all this before."

So, why don’t most of us live like this?

Because it’s hard. 

It’s hard to be patient, hard to play the long game, hard to labor in the quiet and the dark. It is hard to wait for a harvest in a culture of the immediate.

However, neglecting the roots has consequences. If we don’t tend to the roots, we will try to hack for fruit.

Lifehacking is almost a religion in the West. We think we can hack everything. Hack our health, hack our careers, hack our relationships, or hack our faith.

But I have written before and want to reiterate again:

"You can’t hack your way to a beautiful life."

When you resort to shortcuts in life, you risk inevitable failure and leave behind a legacy of unintended harm. God doesn’t want you to hack your walk with Him. Your friends don’t want hacked relationships. Your kids don’t want hacked parenting. Your wife doesn’t want a hacked marriage. A beautiful life is cultivated daily, nourishing the roots of what is meaningful and valuable over time. 

So, I have been extra dialed in the last few months on something I have written about before.

Radical incrementalism. 

Radical Incrementalism is the commitment to do the least you can do to make progress, not the most. It's learning to quit long before you are overwhelmed so that you don’t get exhausted and begin to think that what you are doing is unsustainable. It’s about consistency, not intensity. It’s a focus on the roots and not a scramble for the fruit.

I want to bring back to your attention how Oliver Burkeman shares about this in Four Thousand Weeks regarding writing and completing a Doctoral thesis.

"The psychology professor Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day.

They cultivated the patience to tolerate the fact that they probably wouldn’t be producing very much on any individual day, with the result that they produced much more over the long term. They wrote in brief daily sessions—sometimes as short as ten minutes, and never longer than four hours—and they religiously took weekends off."

Roots, not fruit. Consistency, not intensity.

This is in stark contrast to how the PhD students tended to think. They scrambled for thesis fruit.

"Boice observed that PhD students’ impatience to finish quickly, driven by looming deadlines, actually hindered their progress by causing them to rush the creative process or procrastinate, ultimately leading them to despise their work."

I want to shout this loudly from the rooftops.

Consistency, not intensity.

In the long run, you are much more likely to be consistent in your walk with God by reading a small section of scripture each day and praying for a few minutes than by going on a 40-day fast and scripture binge.

You will have a way better relationship with your kids if you play 20 minutes a day with them rather than thinking you can fix the relational gap with a trip to Disney.

Focus on the roots, not the fruit.
Focus on sowing, not the harvest.
Focus on consistency, not intensity. 

You will obviously have crazy weeks, last-minute drama, and sometimes the need to simply survive. But if you want a rich life of beauty, depth, meaning, and joy, radical incrementalism and root work will yield the harvest you want over time. 

I want a life that opens to the light.
I want a 100x harvest. 
I want fruit that remains.

So, more than ever, I am embracing the quiet, unseen work in the dark.

Praying you tend to the roots this week.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers.

Jon.