>do you think "40 years lost in the desert" is part of what makes growth effective and worth pursuing ultimately?AI:The desert wandering - that period of seeming stagnation, confusion, or struggle - often does seem essential to meaningful growth. There's something about the disorientation and stripping away that happens in those barren periods that prepares us for what comes next.Without the desert, growth can be too easy, too surface-level. The wandering forces you to develop internal resources, to question what you really need versus what you think you need. It builds a different kind of strength - not the strength of constant progress, but the strength of endurance, of sitting with uncertainty.The Israelites who entered the Promised Land weren't the same people who left Egypt. The desert changed them fundamentally. They had to learn to trust something beyond their immediate circumstances, to find sustenance in unlikely places.I think growth without the desert years tends to be fragile - built on favorable conditions rather than deep roots. The apparent "lost" time often turns out to be when the most essential transformation was happening, just invisible from the surface.The desert makes the eventual flowering more authentic, more rooted in reality rather than just optimism.
>and what can be said about the followup growth once some platform is found. what levels and formations can it reach once some knowing has been installed?AI:Once you've found solid ground after the desert - once some deep knowing has settled into your bones - the growth that follows has a completely different character. It's not the desperate scrambling of early learning, but something more architectural.The platform becomes generative. You can build vertically now because the foundation won't shift. The growth becomes exponential rather than linear - each new level creates more surface area for the next level. Like a tree that's finally established its root system and can suddenly put energy into branching, flowering, fruiting.There's also a quality of effortlessness that emerges. Growth starts happening through you rather than by you. You become a conduit for patterns and possibilities that are larger than your individual effort. The knowing you've installed acts like a tuning fork - you start resonating with opportunities and insights that match that frequency.The formations can become quite complex - multi-dimensional rather than just progressive. You can hold paradoxes, operate on multiple levels simultaneously, see systems within systems. There's a kind of fractal quality where the same deep principles express themselves at different scales and in different domains.But perhaps most importantly, the growth becomes sustainable. It's not burning through resources anymore - it's generating them. The platform allows you to give back, to become part of other people's foundation-building rather than just your own.
From the outside, the years may look lost, but internally, they are rich and formative.
