No B.S Friday: If you don’t take charge of your growth, you might not grow at all.
There’s a Scandinavian saying: “The north wind made the Vikings.”
That is, fierce and testing environments make you grow up to be bad-boy sexy.
(That’s why I live in Melbourne.)
No, I’m sure the Vikings weren’t as romantic as we make them out to be these days. I’m sure they didn’t seem that way to the English when they got invaded. They were hard and strong and terrifying.
How did they get that way? Well, they grew up in a place where that was your only choice. If you weren’t tough, you died.
That in turn created a culture that celebrated toughness, and codified it.
I mean, think about what it means to have a mythology where you only get to go to heaven if you die in battle.
I’m actually surprised they survived actually. Surely that creates an incentive for everyone to rush off to battle and get killed. And if all your young men are dying as soon as possible, how do you build a society and culture out of that?
My guess is there must have been something balancing it out – some other cultural fixture that promoted the health of the village and tribe. But I’m not enough of a Viking nerd to know what that is.
(Historians, hit me up.)
Anyway, if you grew up in this tough physical environment and in this tough cultural container, you grew up strong.
(Or you died. Many people probably died. But those who didn’t? Oh boy, tough as nails.)
And this creates one of the key tensions we have to navigate as humans living in 21st Century Australia.
It actually doesn’t get much easier than this.
The physical environment is the envy of the world. People come from all over for a piece of it.
And modern life is incredibly cushy.
I mean think about cars. To our ancestors, cars must seem like a magical and wonderful invention. You can navigate vast distances, can carry large loads, all while sitting in a leather-lined and cushioned seat?
Wonder of wonders.
And we’re like, hold my latte. You know what would make this better? What if we made the cars self-driving, and removed the need for even the tiniest amount of effort from the driving process?
And everything is going this way. If we wanted to, we could get through life almost entirely in climate-controlled environments, doing close to zero amount of physical labour.
But if the north wind made the Vikings, what does this make?
Now, I’m not saying things were necessarily better when we lived on the edge of famine and exposure, or that modern culture is too soft on young people.
I generally think things weren’t better when we used to beat kids to build character and send them down the mines. That wasn’t that long ago.
But what I think it does mean is that we have to become self-responsible for our own growth.
Our environment won’t force growth the way it used to. See we need to take that job on.
We need to seek out the toughness that forces growth. Maybe that’s hitting the gym. Maybe it’s committing to get a certain project done in an ambitious timeline.
The thing to recognise that the whole world wants to support you in your comfort and laziness now.
But if you want toughness and growth…. You’ve got to come up with that yourself.
JG.