Collecting Data, Learning Lessons

Collector is the second phase along the S Curve of Learning. As an Explorer, we use our mental and emotional capacities to explore our options. Once we have decided on a singular S Curve, we become Collectors. Getting smart about growth in this phase involves collecting both quantitative data found in facts and the qualitative data born of experience. From it, we try to decipher whether we should stick with this S Curve or not.⁴

Progress may not be readily observed. Slow is still the essence of this phase. Though impressive, Ulmer’s milestones have been gradually achieved. But in the Collector phase we start to get a sense if we’re gaining the momentum we need to keep growing. We’ll talk more about momentum in later chapters; for now, know that a persistent lack of momentum on an S Curve typically dictates that it’s time to move on.

A Growth Perspective

It’s normal, even prudent, not to want to invest too much time or other resources on a potential new S Curve, only to discover it isn’t really what we want or that it isn’t going to work. But it’s also true that by the time we are adults, we can be hesitant to even consider S Curves that could be available to us. Our premature cognitive commitments program us to only accept a predetermined range of facts: that we’ve experienced failure before; that we’re likely to experience it again; that we’ve learned everything we need to, or everything we can. Perception becomes reality, and our growth ends where our pride and trepidation or, in other words, our fear of shame and failure begins.

When I was about eight years old, in one of the spare bedrooms of my grandparents’ home, I discovered an upright piano along with my Grandma Charlotte’s book Beginning Piano for Adults. A kindergarten teacher by day, Grandma Charlotte was learning to play the piano by night. I remember thinking that Grandma was very, very old—possibly in her early sixties! Silly Grandma! I thought. From somewhere in the ether, I had absorbed the notion that learning was only for children: that’s why children go to school and take music lessons.

Happily, our understanding of growth has grown up since I was child. Pioneering Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck was first to use the term “growth mindset.” The fact that you’re reading this book makes it highly probable that you already have a growth mindset or would like to develop one.

Most of us have a growth mindset—until we don’t. Studying cognitive growth in adolescents, Dweck reports that those with a “fixed mindset” believe they are a known quantity.⁵ Their intelligence and capability are set, and with that assumption, best practice is simply to avoid looking dumb. But those who exhibit a growth mindset understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching, and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or that anyone can be an Einstein, but they believe everyone can get better if they work at it.

Collect Like a Child

The collection phase is crucial to determine whether the curve we’ve chosen is the right one for us right now.

That’s what four-year-old Ulmer did. After pulling together some basic bee data, she added real-world experience to her hive of information. Her dad helped her in the kitchen and with essential business know-how. Her mom provided marketing assistance (leaders encouraging smart growth, again). More collecting. More supporting data.

Children are S Curve naturals because unfamiliarity is not intimidating to them. From a child’s perspective, everything is unfamiliar and exists for them to discover. In fact, they can be so unintimidated, they are likely to be impulsive: moving into action too quickly, collecting shiny pennies helter-skelter.

Ulmer’s parents helped her honor slow. She didn’t move out of the Collector phase prematurely, swimming with the sharks before she was ready. A pitch on Shark Tank can be brutal; half of Shark Tank’s contestants fail to get a deal.⁶ The celebrity investors ask hard questions. They are skeptical and tough. So Ulmer first pitched her cautious parents and persuaded them to put aside their desire to protect her from a Shark Tank heartbreak. Then they worked together for months to prepare and rehearse Ulmer’s pitch for the show, always collecting data.

Caution is not fear. Caution is data collection, gathering evidence that we are on the right curve. Confirming that we’ve collected what we need so that when we do start to go fast, we don’t get stung.

When I asked Ulmer where she is on her S Curve of Learning, I thought she might say she sees herself as having mostly scaled the curve, given the successes she’s piled up. But, no, she described herself as still being on the launch point, just ahead of tipping into the honey sweet spot, with still so much to learn about bees and business. About life. “I’m going into my junior year in high school. It’s overwhelming. I have to figure out what I have time to do and what I want to do,” she said. She’s a Collector.

We can learn a lot about collecting data from children. While adults tend to be experience hoarders, hauling the weighty baggage of past failures and even successes, and wary of climbing new curves, a child is more of an experience Collector, wide open with wonder and curiosity. The renowned Italian doctor and educator Maria Montessori is reported to have said, “The child has a different relation to [her] environment from ours … the child absorbs it. The things [she] sees are not just remembered; they form part of [her] soul.”⁷

When we are Collectors, we gather cautionary and encouraging data about whether we are growing on our curve, whether we enjoy it, and whether we want to keep pursuing it. We collect resources and the ability to utilize them. Like Mikaila Ulmer, we collect emotional and psychological support. And we collect expertise from the people in our environment (see Ecosystem, chapter 7), just as Ulmer collected it from her father’s culinary experience, her parents’ business coaching, and her great grandmother’s heirloom recipe.

We are collecting energy, too: energy to build momentum.

Growth may feel slow, but the promise of “fast” is buzzing in the air.

A young father sent a video to his parents showing their grandson, Ben, riding a bike for the first time. The father captioned it, “First he couldn’t, and then he could.” He explained that he’d been trying to teach Ben to ride the bike for three frustrating weeks, seemingly without progress. But then, suddenly, Ben took off and rode as though none of the previous failures—even the one just five minutes earlier—had ever happened. For three weeks Ben had listened to his father’s instructions, observed his siblings and friends as they rode their bikes, and tried to ride his own. He’d been collecting, thinking, processing, trying to put the pieces together. Growth had been happening out of sight, below detection. On this day, the lily pad of learning had reached the surface of the water, and the leaf unfurled. “All things are difficult before they are easy,” said seventeenth-century scholar and churchman Thomas Fuller.

Like children, Collectors are curious and observant, open to learning and suggestions. Questing and questioning.

The Curve That Started with a Caterpillar

Let’s look at a second young Collector. To seventeenth-century naturalist Maria Merian, insects were both a fascination and a cause. Merian was born in Frankfurt in 1647. Her father died when she was three. Her mother remarried. Her new stepfather—the still-life painter Jacob Marrel—recognized little Maria’s superb gift for art and trained her in his craft.⁸

Merian’s favorite art subject was always insects. She began to grow and study her own silkworms when she was thirteen. At a time when less than 15 percent of women in Germany were taught to read, Merian was lucky enough to have access to books on natural history.⁹ She read voraciously. A first-rate Collector, Merian collected and studied other insects as well, capturing their intricate detail in her art. In the 1600s, many people in Europe still clung to the ancient Greek notion of “spontaneous generation,” believing that insects simply materialized out of litter, dust specks, and mud. Merian knew better. In painstaking detail, she began to piece together the life cycles of her insect specimens.

Still, Merian’s bug work was a side hustle while she held down the typical day job of a seventeenth-century woman. She married a painter and raised two daughters; she cooked, cleaned, and sewed. She supplemented her family’s income by giving drawing lessons to the daughters of wealthy families in Nuremberg. After a long separation, her marriage ended in divorce in 1692, a disaster for most middle-aged women at the time who would have limited economic opportunities and little chance of remarrying. For Merian, it turned out to be fortuitous. Now breadwinners, Merian and her oldest daughter were free to market their own floral paintings; they achieved comfortable financial independence. She expanded her understanding of biology. She mingled with other naturalists. She gained notoriety in the scholarly world as the doyenne of Dutch and English natural science.

At age fifty-two, already beyond the normal life expectancy for the time, Merian obtained permission from the city of Amsterdam to join a scientific expedition bound for the colony of Surinam, to study plant and insect life. It’s hard to overstate this accomplishment. Merian sold more than two hundred of her paintings to finance the venture. From it came Merian’s brilliantly illustrated 1705 book Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Surinamese Insect Metamorphosis). It is a scientific landmark. Pioneering botanists such as Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) would use Merian’s work to identify over one hundred different species. Sir David Attenborough called Merian “one of history’s most significant contributors to the field of entomology.”¹⁰

Counting the Cost

As with Maria Merian, we may grow intuitively, because of hard work or good fortune, or a combination of both. But if we want to grow faster, we will combine intuition with real-world analysis. What are you observing? What does the data you’re collecting tell you?

In the Collector phase, for example, we may discover that an initiative will require more time than we anticipated. This is common. Lasting achievements tend to overrun every aspect of budget. Intrepid Collectors may decide that the opportunity is valuable enough to pursue anyway. Thirteen-year-old Maria Merian wanted to know where butterflies came from. She was willing to invest a lifetime pursuing the curve that started with a caterpillar. Indeed, virtually any plausible S Curve can be scaled if we’re willing to devote enough time and effort. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be given in exchange for it, immediately or in the long run.”

When my family and I moved to Virginia, we found blackberry bushes running rampant in the garden. My husband, raised on his parents’ pick-your-own berry farm, began tending them: pruning, fertilizing, rehabilitating. He harvested enough fruit to make blackberry jam and dozens of cobblers we shared with friends and family. Surprised by how much he enjoyed the process (as a teenager he couldn’t get away from the farm fast enough), my husband considered growing more berries. Could he afford the time? Did he enjoy the work? Would this S Curve yield sufficient growth relative to the effort invested? After counting the cost, he launched into a bigger learning curve. He could have let the blackberries revert to a wild bramble. Instead, he tended them, and also planted strawberries and raspberries. Now we have corn, tomatoes, lettuce, and other greens for the family table and to share with friends. There are wildflowers galore. The S Curve of the garden keeps him growing.

Collect and Curate

As Collectors, we must be keen to spot available resources, and quick to seize and utilize them. This is one of the questions we need to ask ourselves: Can we (and will we) collect the data and resources we need to accelerate along this S Curve?

Maria Merian collected resources from the scientific community of her day, but also from her discerning stepfather. Jacob Marrel would send her out to the field to, literally, collect both the flowers he painted, and the insects she loved. Her ecosystem encouraged her curiosity and abounded with the skills and resources she utilized in her own work.

At age four, Mikaila Ulmer could not possibly have become a businesswoman on her own. But her parents have always helped and encouraged her (“without taking over,” Ulmer says). Her plan evolved in her hometown, inspired by the intersection of community “Lemonade Days” and a forward-thinking school business fair in which even kindergartners could participate. Churchgoers bought her lemonade as they came and went from the chapel next to her house. Marye’s Gourmet Pizza bridged the gap between paper cups and bottling. Ulmer’s little brother was happy to be a taste tester. For Ulmer and Merian, the number one resource to collect was always human.

If you were to compare your growth at this stage to the lily pad’s biological system, you might say you are in the pond with plenty of resources available, but not yet in bloom. The speed of the lily pad’s proliferation depends on (a) the lily pad’s ability to utilize resources, and (b) the room to grow in the pond, or its carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is determined by available resources: oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, nutrients, sunlight, space, and so on.¹¹ You’ve explored and are now collecting the data to determine that you can utilize the resources available to you. With ample carrying capacity, the limits of your resources are not yet apparent.

The chief learning and diversity officer at the Kraft Heinz Company, Pamay Bassey implements growth initiatives for Kraft’s nearly forty thousand humans. She also exemplifies the open, childlike Collector’s mindset. Lifelong learning defines Bassey’s career: from Stanford University where she studied artificial intelligence, to her time as faculty at several universities, including the Josh Bersin Academy of global HR development. Bassey’s approach to self-guided learning is elegant: “For over a decade, I have chosen to focus my projects on my interests: the ways people believe, worship, and learn.”

Bassey’s learning approach stems from her struggle to overcome grief after suffering one of the worst years of her life. Bassey describes 2009 as “total loss.” In 2009 her beloved grandmother died, her father lost his long battle with cancer, and as the year ended, Bassey said, “I experienced a betrayal from a loved one. After a year full of loss, I started wondering how I would heal.”

Rather than resign herself to despair, Bassey fought back with a yearlong exodus out of the mundane, and into an active collection of spirituality: “My 52 Weeks of Worship Project,” she called it. “I visited churches and mosques, synagogues and temples, living rooms and basements. I navigated countless sacred spaces, from the South Side of Chicago to South Africa, from Brazil to Brooklyn.” Disruption via worship? Absolutely! Bassey said:

You might ask: Why spend countless hours in unfamiliar situations, with people I didn’t know, experiencing traditions and rituals that I knew nothing about, while sharing my pain and grief with strangers? The answer is that I wanted to believe that goodness still existed in the world. I looked for it everywhere: in the eyes of every person I met, not just at my home church or only in familiar places. My grandmother used to say, “If you are really looking for something, you should look everywhere”—so that’s what I did.

Bassey’s passion project turned into a book, My 52 Weeks of Worship: Lessons from a Global, Spiritual, Interfaith Journey, a companion journal, Navigating Sacred Spaces, and a TEDx talk with the same title.¹² Bassey brought a childlike mindset and a wide net to Collecting and found many hospitable and healing ecosystems: “Being open to experimenting, acknowledging that answers to my questions could be found in many different places, was key.”

One of our tasks as Collectors is to curate the collection. Out with the outdated, the useless, distracting, and the undermining. We want to rid ourselves of deadweight adult attitudes and reclaim our older, wiser mindset that makes a child a growth machine. Recovering our ability to collect the way a child does, openly and with optimism, isn’t automatic, but there are strategies that help. Here are some of them.

The Collector’s Notebook

It’s a good idea to keep a log of the metrics we set for ourselves. A daily record of our reaction to people and events in our life can shed light on where we are still giving in to self-sabotage, and where we are achieving the childlike growth mindset.

For example, I like to sort through the data of my day for the best moment, and then ask myself how I was creating in that moment. When I shift to the worst moment, it commonly involves some type of competition. My supposed adversary could be another person, or it could be myself: the image of who I think I am supposed to be or what I am supposed to get done. In competitive scenarios, the internal chatter tends to be negative.

What I have discovered is that a day’s worst moment often hinges on something that I didn’t do or didn’t try to do because I thought I couldn’t. But this audit makes me aware of that quirk. Being aware is always a prelude to change.

By contrast, in my best moments I was usually fully immersed in what I was doing; my internal dialogue was kind and encouraging. I was feeling confident. In real time, I was becoming more of the me I want to be. (We’ll talk more about this in Metamorph, chapter 4.)

Collectors keep records of the data from their explorations, lest information is lost as quickly as it’s discovered. I advocate for a journal. Recording data prevents achievable goals from being forgotten and progress from being lost in the shuffle of daily routine. When progress is measured and reported the rate of improvement accelerates, even if we are only reporting to ourselves in a private log. Former GE executive and journaling virtuoso Bob Cancalosi taught me to review my journal every thirty days.

As I review my journal, themes and patterns emerge. And, more importantly, I can detect the subtle growth I’ve achieved and feel the psychological boost of accomplishment. Regarding her landmark diary, Anne Frank wrote, “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” In the hellish ecosystem of the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Anne Frank collected courage from her diary. We can collect courage too, when we recognize progress along the slow base of our S Curve.

Use Your Words

Being a Collector means seeing yourself as a Collector: a person who has already taken on the identity associated with an S Curve that is underway. As an Explorer, you assessed your identity. You determined who you were at the launch point, and who you wanted to be going forward. Now it’s time to acknowledge your new identity, no matter how nascent.

A simple grammar exercise will help you do this. Imagine your S Curve goal is finishing a marathon. Instead of saying “I run” (verb), start saying “I am a runner” (noun). Using a noun rather than a verb represents “an opportunity to become a certain kind of person,” says Stanford University psychology professor Gregory M. Walton. This subtle switch is what Walton calls a psychologically precise intervention. “These interventions are much like everyday experiences,” he wrote in 2014. “They aim, simply, to alter a specific way in which people think or feel in the normal course of their lives, to help them flourish.”²⁰ Walton shows, for example, that a group of individuals who describe themselves with the statement, “I am a voter,” had an increase of 11 percentage points in their voter turnout compared to individuals in a group that self-described with the statement “I vote.”

Saying “I am a writer” makes it more likely that the book will get finished than saying “I write.” As a Christian, I find it powerful that Jesus repeatedly proclaims himself with “I am” statements: “I am the Good Shepherd,” “I am the Bread of Life,” “I am the Living Water.” To grow smarter and faster, we need to use “I am” statements to help us self-actualize. You’re a pianist, you’re a runner, you’re a Collector.

That “I am” moment of self-actualization is one of the markers of moving past the Explorer phase and into the Collector phase. Marcus Whitney, the self-taught computer programmer you met in the Explorer chapter, didn’t explore for long. He had the desire for economic mobility. He determined programming could get him there. His exploration—though brief—was long enough to know he wanted to be on this S Curve. This allowed Whitney to move into the Collector phase where he could begin to study, to practice, and to collect relationships with people from whom he could learn. “I was very, very fortunate,” he said, “to have an uncle who was a programmer.” He could see him, so he could be him. “And who gave me a computer so I could learn.” Whitney collected proof points that he could be on the computer programmer S Curve. He said, “I am a programmer,” and so he was.

A Flying Leap

As we collect data, a new idea or behavior is on probation. There will be some things we try more than once, but then discontinue. Even the things we ultimately decide not to pursue can contribute to our growth.

Our dreams, like those of Eric Schurenberg, can change over time. In the late 1970s, Schurenberg would have been surprised to learn that he would become head of the publishing powerhouse Mansueto Ventures, home to Inc. and Fast Company magazines. An outsider may see Schurenberg’s career as a textbook example of the corporate climb: managing editor at Money magazine, then editor in chief at CBS MoneyWatch, later, president and editor in chief at Inc. An upward trajectory. But in 1978, he hardly knew what business journalism was. Back then, Schurenberg was an actor.

The future Inc. CEO, Schurenberg, is listed in an old New York Times theater review as one of the fictional bar goers in Sing Melancholy Baby, 18th Street Playhouse, New York City. Theater wasn’t a bad S Curve for Schurenberg. He graduated magna cum laude from the theater arts program at Brown University and over six years he steadily rose in showbiz. But “it wasn’t what I wanted,” Schurenberg told me when I interviewed him. So back he went to the launch point to explore a new curve.

Publishing was familiar to him. Schurenberg says about his theater arts degree, “There was a little bit of acting going on, but mainly it meant I read a lot of plays. It was a literary course as much as anything else.” He says, “All through school, people had told me I was a pretty good writer.”²¹

He did some investigative collecting—evidently rookie writers were getting jobs out of a “Publishing Procedures” course at Radcliffe College. Schurenberg enrolled. He landed his first publishing job: a rookie writer at Time-Life Books.

Being a journalist may seem like a far cry from being an actor. It’s often only in the aggregate that a Collector’s disparate abilities start to demonstrate unifying themes. As his star began to rise in the publishing world, Schurenberg found himself talking to the biggest actors on the global business stage. “Suddenly, I had gone from being at this arm’s-length remove from the people who make the economy go, to talking to them directly and … meeting them face-to-face.” After he became editor of Inc., Schurenberg was at a financial conference that happened to be just down the street from the old theater where he had once played onstage.

I took a quick break from the rubber chicken dinner and walked down to the theater.… I was absolutely gripped by laughter. It was a kind of philosophical laughter. “How on Earth did I get from there, George Street theater, to this financial conference?” It seems so improbable.

But there was yet another S Curve waiting in the wings, one for which Schurenberg had been collecting data since he was a child. He dreamed of becoming an airplane pilot.

“My father was a guy who wanted to be a flyer his whole life … but responsibilities made him rule that out,” he told me. Though he never became a pilot himself, Schurenberg’s father was an aviation aficionado to such an extent that he built full-scale, working models of biplanes at their home, a couple of which are now in museums. “I was such a geek as a kid,” Schurenberg shares, “and so interested in aviation that I won an award from the Greater Cincinnati Library for my collection of books about World War One aviation, some of which are autographed by the aces who were profiled in the books.”

As time passed, this childhood dream of a flying S Curve sputtered. Schurenberg said, “[It looked] like I might be going on the same path as my dad: just being an admirer from afar.” When I asked how his dream finally took flight, Schurenberg taught me a key Collector principle: “I broke the goal down into achievable parts. The hard part was getting started, but once I did, there was a regimen, like military flight training with a schedule and milestones and dates attached.”

Eric Schurenberg received his pilot’s license in 2020. The S Curve was steep. The personal cost was considerable. But Schurenberg’s drive was considerable, too. One of the factors that brought his dream to life was the relationship between his goal and his core values. He had struggled with this decision. “How can learning to fly be important if it doesn’t aid the greater good?” he wondered. Contributing to society is a core value for Schurenberg. But, he says, “I also valued being true to myself. And I felt that my life would be incomplete if I did not master this skill.” He concludes, “Now that I have this skill, I can bend it to social good.”

I would add that if we don’t do something we know we need to do, we are withering, not growing, and very little social good ever comes of that.

Some S Curves are puddle jumpers: some you will hop on, and some you will hop off. This is not failure; this is exploring and collecting. You only keep some model airplanes. You keep some butterflies. But even those S Curves that we ultimately discard can contribute to our growth. No learning is ever wasted.

Like Schurenberg, Canadian-born attorney Marie-Louise Skafte had been collecting data on her dream of flying a plane since childhood, inspired by her father who was a former member of the Royal Danish Air Force and then a commercial airline pilot. “I would sit in the cockpit with my dad and observe,” Skafte says. “My love of flying even caused me to apply for a part-time flight attendant’s job in law school, which I kept in my early years as a practicing attorney.”²²

The odds were against Skafte ever earning her wings. But she told me, “It was always a nagging feeling that I needed to pursue it.” As a biracial woman, Skafte notes that women represent roughly 6 percent of pilots, and Black women less than 1 percent. “I’ve been the ‘first’ and the ‘only’ in many aspects of my life,” Skafte said. Told “Blacks don’t swim” by her regional swimming coach, Skafte switched swim clubs and went on to become the only Black woman in Canada competing at the national and international levels, ditto at Cornell University. Skafte served as vice president and general counsel of marine shipping container industry leader Cronos Limited in a time when less than 5 percent of transportation management or C-suite officers were women, and even fewer were minorities. While others scare up data suggesting she can’t, Skafte collects and stockpiles evidence that she can.

Like Schurenberg, Skafte broke down the piloting S Curve to make it achievable—collecting one data point, then another: “I started with ‘discovery’ flights at a few different flight schools to find the right fit. Because of my limited availability and extensive travel for work, I needed a school and an instructor who understood that I was one of the few who weren’t doing this ‘the fastest way possible.’ ” It took her four years to obtain a multi-engine commercial pilot’s license. The costs in time, stress, and money were high.

Eric Schurenberg and Marie-Louise Skafte are you and me. We each have dreams we’ve carried, dreams others may have told us are implausible, impractical. Maybe we’ve told ourselves that, too. We can’t go back to our childhoods, but as their experiences demonstrate, we can choose to go back to the childlike curiosity and hope that first conceived those dreams.

Sometimes it’s hard to get started. The slow pace at the launch point of a new S Curve can defy us. But if we take time to explore, we will find the right fit. By collecting quantitative and qualitative data and resources—and curating to eliminate the deadweight—we prepare to tip into the sweet spot of momentum. We record the answers to our questions, and we track the progress we make, however slight and slow it may seem. It is still possible to course correct if our collecting reveals compelling reasons to do so. But our goal is to proceed with suitable caution and the childlike mindset that keeps us from getting in our own way.

And then, suddenly, we’ll throttle forward. Taxiing will give way to acceleration. The end of the runway approaches. Excitement and jitters notwithstanding, we are ready to fly up this learning curve. Slow, fast, slow—that’s how we grow. Fast has arrived.

Prepare for the thrill.

This phase typically feels    

Collector Takeaways

The second stage on the S Curve of Learning is collecting. As an Explorer, you used your mental and emotional capacity to explore many options. Now that you have decided a particular S Curve merits further exploration, you are a Collector. You collect the quantitative data of facts and the qualitative data of experience. You are collecting data that supports sticking (or not) with this S Curve. Progress is happening, but it can be hard to spot. Slow is the essence of this phase.

This part of the launch phase involves recovering your brain’s ability to collect the way a child does: openly, with optimism. Yet it can include such a large volume of new information to process, and important decisions to make, that your brain can overload. The excitement associated with novelty can quickly give way to stress and alarm. The stress-linked brain hormones adrenaline and cortisol make the challenge of sorting new information and making decisions even harder. The Collector phase makes you confront how this new S Curve may impact your identity. Growing in this area may clash with the way others see you, or it may not fit in with the way you see yourself. Stress can result when you feel uprooted from your old self, even if you’re dissatisfied with who you are.

As a Collector, you identify and collect the resources you need. Then you make room for those resources by eliminating ghosts of self-doubt. You furnish your mind with the growth mindset of childhood. Three tips for being a world-class Collector are to:

1. Audit your adult self; get reacquainted with your childlike self.
2. Pay attention and cultivate childlike wonder consistently.
3. Become a world-class Collector of feedback.

When you approach new opportunities with a childlike mindset and collect data without reservation, you can evaluate whether growth, however slow, is leading to momentum. Does the data you’re collecting support staying on this path, or does it suggest you move on to another? Some S Curves are puddle jumpers: you hop on, you hop off. This is not failure. This is collecting.