If You're Not Burning You're Not Growing

This missif #3 of ten.

A series of writings helping you, your company, be wiser, energised, freer of worry, and more happily out of control ;-). A series of writings helping you grow good roots. Ultimately, maybe you’ll be nudged to work which leaves only positive footprints, because that’s what’s needed right now. For now though, a story or three.

Last time, in letter #2, a cat, a sports psychologist and Jung walked into a bar…

If you missed the punchline, check it out here

I made loose promises of relief from the stories and structures which constrain you, these being a source of the malaise, the waning plateau, on which you or your work or company slides.

However, the relief you seek will only slowly reveal…

For now, those stories...

1 Fire Stick Farming.

A few years back, I was in Australia.

At the time, colossal wildfires were making news, trailing destruction as they went. It turns out, clever geologists now know, that these fires, at this scale and in this way, are a post colonial treat, like much else besides.

The post colonial fire management strategy was to carve rich forest into packages, ring fenced by avenues of hacked back jungle. These avenues, the thinking went, creating giant breaks starving fire of resource, halting it in its tracks. Fire, a normal and natural phenomon, contained to more manageable chunks.

The aboriginal approach, as I understand it, was different. Tending the land as they had for tens of thousands of years, they understood that everything has a time to burn. Fire, in and off itself, is not a problem. It’s a normal part of the regenerative process. The problem is everything all at once fire.

Their approach was different. We might sum it up in a sentence:

Everything has a time to burn.

This means that a little bit of fire, always and often, keeps the whole alive; vibrant, continually regenerative, this grass now, that tree later, and so on. Everything having a time to burn before it grows too wild or knarly, too entangled with its neighbours. This in turn feeding an everything everywhere fire.

Everything has a time to burn.

2 Giving it away

You, me, aunty Doris and the rest of our mind addled human cousins, are exceptionally good at adding: we buy, consume, add people, ideas, projects, businesses into the mix of our lives, always and often.

We are adding machines. It helps soothe and satisfy our twitchy, nervous minds, fodder foir hungry ghosts. It’s also how we peacock wealth and status, affirm our belonging. We see this in gleaming glass towers punctuating skylines. We see this in shiny metal.boxes populating driveways. And much else between.

Adding and displaying makes us feel something.

It was not always so.

The indigenous first nation people of the Pacific northwest knew otherwise. Meet Potlach, a celebration of sharing and simplifying.

Towards the end of the harvest season the chief would gather the tribe together, to give everything away. He would give away the surplus food, materials (and potentially, let’s be honest, the occasional wife or two). This made good sense, of course; share food and resources ready for the coming winter and, in so doing, make the group stronger, more resilient. It’s wise leadership. It touches on an important principle too, one playing out across nature: give everything away, cut it back, and you invite new growth. This nature’s response, this the human response.

Burning invites new growth. Giving away invites new growth.

3 What Apple would never do.

The IPhone 16 launches about now.

I know only because the radio told me.

A relentless march of the new, the shiny, the incremental commercial gains. Except it’s not very incremental, Apple hoarding monumental piles of cash as they go. Their fruits of your need.

Imagine then an alternative ‘this week’ scenario.

Not the new release, a bigger camera, smarter AI, version 16 of the addictive (if useful) super computer in your pocket.

No, instead, an AI, turtle necked Steve Jobs taking to the screen not to announce the new iPhone, but to announce the end of the iPhone.

I’ll return to that.

For now, journey back a few years.

It’s 3rd July, 1973.

Sitting back stage of the Hammersmith Apollo sits Ziggy Stardust, about to go on stage for what will be the last showing.

Now, some context for those of you who don’t know. Ziggy is the biggest musical sensation of the time. Think Bollywood hyper star fused with Ed Sheeran. Yep, that big. Ziggy was the musical ‘product’ of David Bowie. He, I’m sure you know. If not, ask your parents.

Sitting back stage that December night, Bowie knew it was time to kill of Ziggy. That killing off Ziggy was necessary to stoke the creative fires. Fail to kill him off and he’d grow fat and lazy, his creative juices dulled.

Which brings us back to Apple.

People or giant companies grow fat and lazy on the fruits of their successes, their conveniences. For Apple, trillions of dollars in the bank account. For you, the ease and comfort of an okay-ness. An illusion of control and predictability.

These conveniences dull our energies. Think of the power, the creative genius, which would be unleashed if Apple discontinued their cash cow? And the same is true for you. Discontinue the convenience and you’ll tap into your deepest roots, the creative potential, which is your human birthright.

Kill off too much convenience and invite new growth. Burn the idea no longer serving you, regenerate your soil as you do.

These the lessons playing out in nature, all around.

Much of what we’re writing to, this invitation to renew, arresting a decline, a gnawing boredom or coming obsalesence, is in some form about roots.

Re-finding the roots you’ve lost, buried as they are under the overgrowth of time, habits and stories no longer serving you.

You’re ripe for a little burning: some fire stick farming. It’s time to give away what no longer serves you. Is it time to kill off your darlings, your iPhone cash cow?

And in doing so, you’ll clear ground to re find those roots, not to mention your inmate pools of ingenuity and creative wisdom.

What might you burn today?

Next week we get into your roots which might be hiding below. Roots we might understand as…:

  • The needs which drive you.

  • The generational traits running through you.

  • The stories which shape you.

Until next time.

ben johnson