Mission Accomplished

Let’s recap. We started with an opportunity, or opportunities, and explored the potential of one or more S Curves of Learning with our seven-question template (see Explorer, chapter 1). Our objective? To determine if the option we’re most attracted to (or that we’ve been forced to accept for the time being) could produce smart growth that will exceed the price we pay to pursue it. We calculated. Is it achievable, easy to test, familiar, yet novel? While much of the cost was qualitative—how much will I need to change to be who I aspire to be—some of the cost can be quantified, the financial investment required or the time commitment involved.

For Emily and Erik Orton, this required considering the cost of a sailboat, repairs, living at sea, the impact of time away from Erik’s conventional career. They are not wealthy. Emily was a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom. But the Ortons wanted to have a life-changing experience with their children. Here’s a peek into their dialogue about the financial cost:

Emily: What’s the worst that could happen?

Erik: We could be financially ruined, never recover, have to send our kids to live with relatives, and all our friends will think we’re idiots.

“We agreed it wasn’t likely,” Emily said, “and we’d still be young enough to make a comeback if it happened.” In terms of fulfillment of purpose, personal and family growth, and ensuing opportunities, the costs were subsumed by the potential reward.³ The Ortons acted.

If the results of your own exploration and collection are positive, and you are willing to commit and persevere, you can hopefully power through the painful obstacles of the launch point into the sweet spot. Ever smart about your growth, you’ll then stay focused until your metamorphosis is complete.

Recalling his family’s penultimate day aboard Fezywig, Erik Orton wrote:

We sailed past the basin where we had first learned to sail. I couldn’t help but laugh at our first, chaotic family sail there. We had bounced off channel pylons, dropped sail ties into the water, and generally bumbled around while Eli and Lilly (our two youngest children) screamed their heads off. We still had our issues, but now we more or less had our act together. That first sail felt like another life. I was a different person now. So was Emily. We all were.

Allow yourself to celebrate in the Anchor phase. Becoming the different people that we set out to be is cause for it. Social anthropologist Frank E. Manning writes, “Celebration is an important part of our cultural repertoire—it’s the means through which people claim their identity and fashion their sense of purpose.”⁴ Celebration draws a symbolic line between old and new, giving us a clearer sense of how far we’ve come.

Remember how former Baxter CEO Harry Kraemer (from the introduction) came to Anchor after a storied business career.⁵ But he didn’t take much of a break before he set a course for the uncharted waters of academia. Did Kraemer get a chance to celebrate, I wondered?

He told me he did, and in a remarkable way. He had six weeks free before he started teaching at Kellogg School of Management. What might his wife, Julie Kraemer, have in mind? “She said, ‘That’s easy.’ We’re going to fly to Europe with the five kids—all bizarre ages.” Kraemer children ranged from three to sixteen. And they weren’t going to an all-inclusive resort either. All seven Kraemers flew to Paris and rented a van. “Remember that movie Family Vacation with Chevy Chase?” Kraemer said. No travel itinerary. No hotel reservations. “Wherever we end up, we end up.”

Four weeks later, the Kraemers ended up in Rome. More than a mere road trip, this was a celebration, a trek, and a family bonding experience—an important bookend to Kraemer’s corporate career.

A Cause for Celebration

B. J. Fogg advocates celebration to mark what I would call the Anchor point on even the smallest of S Curves. Fogg is a leading behavioral scientist: founder-director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. Fogg’s work explores the causal relationship between emotions and habits. Feelings come first, Fogg teaches. Based on extensive research and the real-time coaching of over forty thousand people, Fogg’s theory posits that habit formation is not, as the popular formula teaches, a matter of twenty-one days of consistent practice.⁶ With pleasure and positive emotions being part of the brain’s reward system, celebrating our achievements anchors that emotional uplift in our memory. “Emotions create habits,” he says.

Fogg recommends we celebrate at three points that map well to the S Curve. Identify a new skill or behavior you are developing. Celebrate when you remember to perform it (launch point), celebrate while you’re performing it (sweet spot), celebrate when you finish performing it (mastery). Celebration can be as simple as looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, “Victory.” The positive feelings generated by celebration help our brains internalize a new habit.

Sometimes, particularly when we’re tired, it’s easy to forget what we did well, what we accomplished in our most recent waking hours. Self-criticism can convince us the day was a failure, a waste. Remember to applaud the little victories. This is yet another good reason to journal.

Celebrating a Willingness to Fail

What constitutes a victory, or amounts to a defeat, is often a matter of perspective. If Sifan Hassan—2019 women’s world champion runner—were to run a 10K in thirty-five minutes, she would probably call it a defeat. If I were to run a 10K in seventy-five minutes, I’d call that a victory. Keep in mind that every expert was once a neophyte, making childlike mistakes, dropping sail lines into the water or getting seasick, tackling something wholly unfamiliar. When you have the courage to take on a new challenge, to get in over your head, the courage you evince is a victory itself. It is cause for celebration, regardless of the specific outcome. A lot of smart growth is fueled by failure turned to good purpose. Failure isn’t failure if it gives you power to progress.

That’s what Glen Nelson learned when he was brave enough to pick up a sketch pad. Nelson is a nonfiction writer and art curator by profession. As cofounder and codirector of the nonprofit Center for Latter-day Saint Arts in New York City, Nelson celebrates the work of other Latter-day Saint artists and serves as a hub for their creative community.⁷ Painters, actors, writers, choreographers, composers, musicians, playwrights—these LDS creators have been drawn to New York for over a century. Their shared culture and faith make them a unique part of New York City’s varied art scene.

The concept behind the center came to Nelson in the late nineties. Nelson was a recent New York University graduate working as an opera librettist around the time a young composer—a student at the Juilliard School—approached him with a simple question.⁸ Nelson said, “She was programming her master’s degree recital and wanted to perform at least one work by a composer who shared her beliefs. ‘Where can I go,’ she asked, ‘to find music that expresses my belief?’ The short answer was, nowhere. It doesn’t exist.”

It occurred to Nelson that artists within his faith tradition needed such a place to gather expressions, preserve them, and celebrate both the artwork and the broader culture it reflects to anchor the culture’s identity. If such an ecosystem did not exist to nurture and stimulate Latter-day Saint artists in New York, Nelson resolved to create one himself.

Two decades later, Nelson and his codirectors are still actively promoting works by LDS creators. In 2021 they inaugurated their first private gallery directly across from Juilliard and the Metropolitan Opera.

But before that they had to endure 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, which put their plans temporarily on hold. New York art galleries closed. Nelson was stuck on standby, stuck at home on the Upper West Side. So he launched a new learning curve, creating his own art. “I’ve wanted to try to draw for as long as I can remember,” he told me, “but I’ve always psyched myself out.”

Believing you can do something can be a challenge, especially when you’re an adult. In Collector (chapter 2), we discussed how the flexible growth mindset of childhood starts to harden into fixed self-assumptions. Having first trained as a dancer, however, Nelson was accustomed to stretching.

Nelson purchased the venerable Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. His goal was to read the book, complete its exercises, and journal about the experience. He shared some of his drawings via the blog Can I Draw If I Think, “I Can’t Draw”? so it’s easy to follow his progress.⁹

The project ended on April 2, 2020, less than two weeks after it began.

In the first two days, he describes himself as nervous, embarrassed, and skittish to display his obviously amateur efforts. He realizes that he’s impatient and not a close observer, an idiosyncrasy that this learning curve requires him to confront. “I’m realizing immediately that to draw, I need to slow it down and get the parts of my brain involved that can measure the distances between one thing and another thing and then capture that on the page,” he writes on the second day.

The next day, he’s “starting to think of drawings I’d like to make in the future.” In only three days, Nelson is beginning to think of himself as someone who draws, rather than as someone who doesn’t even doodle. On day four, he completes the exercise and writes, “I felt like a real artist doing that.” On this chronologically brief S Curve, I believe this marks his tip into the steep sweet spot. The next few days’ exercises posed new challenges, but Nelson was able to apply techniques he had already learned and stretch himself to solve the problems those drawings presented. “Normally,” he wrote, “I would have quit after trying and failing for a while.”

Nearing the end of the workbook, he expresses dread about a portrait exercise; the first assignment had been a self-portrait, and the result hadn’t pleased him, “The book warned me about these self-doubts and advised me to push through them.” He did. Some parts still exceeded his ability to execute as he would have liked. “And yet, when I look back at the first self-portrait I made just a week ago, I know I’ve come a long way. I need to feel motivated and pleased by that.” He concludes, “This has been transformational for me.”

“Motivated and pleased” is that sense of quiet celebration at the Anchor stage, that moment where we commemorate the crossing from the old to the new. If we think of Nelson’s S Curve as setting out to master all the nuances of drawing, then he’s still on the launch point—collecting. But he gave this S Curve specific parameters: to read the book, complete the exercises, and journal. It was a brief, but challenging learning curve. It was a solid smart growth win. Whether your S Curve is modest or monumental, you have changed. In the aggregate, many small anchorings like this add up to major growth.

Etta King, with whom I volunteer in the Relief Society, a women’s organization, shared a similar anchoring experience from a printmaking class.¹⁰ She was hesitant; she had taken a swipe at this art form in college but couldn’t create with her hands what was in her head. At the end of the semester, she had turned in her tools and thought that was that. This is not uncommon when trying something new; it’s why we explore and collect. Some S Curves are too financially, emotionally, or psychologically costly and frustrating to provide value, and it’s good to figure that out early rather than late.

Twenty years later, notwithstanding demanding family and work responsibilities, King wanted to try again. A family friend and art professor, Doug Himes, suggested she audit his course at nearby Southern Virginia University. “I forgot how time consuming it was. Sometimes it took me more than an hour to clean up the ink and my workspace.” She continues, “It was hard, so hard. On the final project (as with Nelson, a self-portrait), I wanted to give up. My tendency is, if it can’t be perfect or the best, I’m not going to do it at all.”

Himes provided the support all good leaders give, launch pointers. He was both an excellent instructor and a champion encourager. He continually said to King, “It’s about the process, not the product. Try again. Adjust this. Try again.”

Perfectionism is the enemy of smart growth for many of us. British writer and theologian G. K. Chesterton said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” If we are to reach our potential, we need to be brave enough to be imperfect. When King bravely turned her focus to the process instead of the quality of the finished product, she produced an imperfect art piece, but there was also progress that had before eluded her, and a new sense of joy and freedom in the process. Celebrating her anchoring moment, King told me, “It was really good to know that I could do something hard, and that it didn’t have to be perfect.”

In their 2006 book, Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, positive psychology experts Fred B. Bryant and the late Joseph Veroff explain that the celebration of achievement is an internal experience as much as it is an external one.¹¹ This doesn’t mean we don’t commemorate the occasion with others, but much of the meaning associated with a meaningful ending is the meaning we alone make of it, the value we ultimately internalize from the hope, belief, and effort we’ve expended in reaching our objective.

Bryant’s own story of summiting fourteen-thousand-foot Snowmass Mountain in the Colorado Rockies is a perfect example of anchoring celebration. Bryant had made two prior, unsuccessful attempts. He knew that reaching this pinnacle was probably a once-in-a-lifetime event. Finally at the summit, he lingered with his friends, taking in the spectacular view, and then embraced them and expressed his gratitude to be sharing his joy in the moment with them.

Internally, Bryant was reflecting. He remembered his first commitment to the quest. He thought about all the training, the prep work, the maps, the vagaries of weather, the back injury that almost thwarted him, and the gnawing fear he’d never make it. The adversity he’d encountered made the delayed realization of the dream more meaningful. He anticipated relating the experience to his family. He’d be proud to recall it in later years, and he imagined the pride his late grandfather, an avid outdoorsman, would have had in his accomplishment. Bryant took time to savor the sensations of the moment—the smell and taste of the cold, pine-scented air, the sound of the wind and how it felt on his face, the details of the view before him. He committed these meaning-making and meaning-internalizing specifics to memory. It was a quiet celebration, lasting just ten minutes. The weather was turning. Time to descend.

Staying present in the many moments—including the mundane ones—of an S Curve will bring you to the Anchor stage. When you arrive there, do yourself the honor of being present and taking time to recognize what you’ve accomplished. This is key to celebrating your achievement. It is key to capturing this fleeting, liminal space, where the past flows into the present, and the present promises all the future may hold. Pause to Anchor this victory in your memory.

Bittersweet Reflections

While anchoring is cause for celebration, it is not a time of unmitigated happiness. The satisfaction of reaching the harbor is also accompanied by sadness that the voyage has come to an end. It’s important to acknowledge that poignancy—–there is celebration, gratitude, and a touch of sorrow. We may also feel at loose ends, a little lost without the structure our learning curve required.

Dan Pink, author of multiple New York Times–bestselling books on business and human behavior, summarizes, “Adding a small component of sadness to an otherwise happy moment elevates the moment rather than diminishing it. The best endings don’t leave us happy. They produce something richer. A rush of unexpected insight, a fleeting moment of transcendence.”¹²

At the high end of the learning curve, the plants in the pond have proliferated across the surface; their roots have spread to fill the pond floor. There is a splendid spectacle of blossoms, but a whiff of decay as well. The flowers’ blooming is fleeting. The lily pads cover the pond, preventing sunlight from penetrating the water and reaching the roots, the soil and its nutrients are depleted, the once abundant resources have been exhausted. In this particular pond, there is no more room for the lilies to grow. But those flowers! At this moment? How can we not pause to glory in them?

The Ortons’ sailing adventure didn’t wrap up quite as tidily as my initial recounting may have made it seem. They did dock in Manhattan, in the middle of the night, and walk home. But that was about three weeks after they planned to reach port. On what was meant to be their last night at sea, the Ortons encountered high winds and rough water. They sought shelter a bit south of their destination. While in port, they tore a hole in the bottom of their boat. They were taking on water at a brisk pace. Bailing frantically, they saved the boat and had it hauled out of the water for repairs. They had to leave Fezywig and rent an SUV to get seven weary sailors home. Orton writes in Seven at Sea, “We drove up I-95 and across the George Washington Bridge, turned onto Broadway, and pulled into a parking space across the street from our apartment building. We sat in the car in silence. Karina offered a prayer for all of us. Then she cried. Emily cried, silent tears running down her face.”

Returning to Fezywig to unload and clean her, Orton says, “We needed to see if she was okay. We needed to remind each other we were okay. We patted her hull and took a few pictures. Good boat. We walked to the dock with all the kids and noticed the sunset.” When the repairs were complete, the family sailed the boat up the Hudson. They took pictures that didn’t turn out well in the fading light. “We would have to remember this one in our minds,” writes Orton. “Emily and the kids turned on music and danced on deck. This was definitely something worth celebrating.” They tied up and then walked home.

Zaza Pachulia (Accelerator, chapter 3) had reached the pinnacle of his sport and the top of his S Curve as a member of the 2017 and 2018 world champion Golden State Warriors. After poignant reflection, he decided to celebrate the achievement by retiring. “I wish I could play basketball the rest of my life,” he told me, “but it’s just not possible.” Meanwhile, he had four children, ranging in age from twelve to three. He’d been playing since before they were born. He could now spend more time with his family. Pachulia was “thankful, great career, sixteen years in the game. This game gave me a lot.”¹³ He was anchored.

It helped that he had a job offer in management from the Golden State Warriors. They offered various leadership positions. All sounded interesting. He said, “How about I do everything?” So, Pachulia’s first year after retiring as a player, the challenging pandemic season of 2019–2020, that’s what he did. He has determined that he doesn’t want to coach, but the exploration and data collection continue on the business side. Consistently smart about his growth, he will likely scale multiple operational S Curves before he leaves professional basketball—if he ever does.

Milestones of Gratitude and Grief

As I conduct interviews for the Disrupt Yourself podcast, I’m continually reminded that many of the high-achieving people I talk to are immigrants (like Zaza Pachulia) or the children of immigrants (Erik Orton is a second-generation American). For centuries, immigrants have left their homelands under duress, escaping the consequences of war, famine, or a lack of economic opportunity.¹⁴

Anchoring in a new land marks the end of a journey. In that moment, immigrants experience perhaps this poignant mix of celebration and sorrow as strongly or more strongly than anyone. Angela Blanchard, the globally prominent expert practitioner in community development who you met in Explorer (chapter 1), has worked with refugees and immigrants for most of her life. “At every milestone,” she says, “there will be gratitude and grief in equal measure.”

I’m a descendant of immigrants to the United States. Some of my ancestors on my mother’s side were Lowland Scots, such as Ebenezer Bryce. On my father’s side, I’m part Cornish, descended from headstrong Celtic people who long ago were pushed into the rugged extremity of England’s southwest.

My Cornish ancestors left their homes as an exploding population exhausted local resources. In the nineteenth century, Cornwall, long a center of copper mining, was also a world leader in the technologies required to prevent flooding, create ventilation, and manage other mine hazards, along with the day-to-day necessities of getting ore mined hundreds of feet below ground up to the surface.¹⁵

Though Cornwall’s mines were depleted, demand for copper was skyrocketing abroad. Opportunity abounded for technicians who would cross seas. Twenty percent or more of the Cornish population emigrated each decade during the late 1800s. They migrated to the United States, of course, but also to Australia, South Africa, Mexico, and elsewhere.

With them, they brought the mining technology, but also Methodist chapels and distinctive cemeteries.¹⁶ And their national portable handheld lunch—the Cornish pasty. Even soccer came to Mexico and other parts of the New World along with Cornish miners.¹⁷

To take on the challenge of emigration, the math must be compelling and the cost of staying far outweighing the costs of leaving. Dropping anchor and coming ashore may be a relief and joy to be celebrated, but also a sorrow to be borne.

I think about how my Cornish ancestors must have mourned, grieving deeply with homesickness and longing for family and friends. But perhaps, upon reaching their new home, they also celebrated by expressing gratitude in worship, kicking a ball, cooking pasties, or otherwise beginning to integrate the life left behind with the new life awaiting. They celebrated to claim who they now were, both sad and happy that their journey was at an end, the anchor dropped.

Anchor Aweigh

The Orton family sails on—return trips to the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. There’s scuba diving now. Emily and Erik surf. In 2018, Erik climbed El Capitan, the sheer three-thousand-foot granite tower that overshadows Yosemite National Park. They go to school; they go to work. The Ortons celebrate the rhythm of life and learning.

I like comparing the S Curve to a wave: rising, cresting, crashing, and washing into shore. My conversation with Laird Hamilton, an American big-wave surfer, only reinforces the idea. He says, “Every wave is the beginning. The ride, then the kick out, which is the end, and every wave is its own learning curve because every single wave is different. You immediately separate from yourself. You become a part of the ocean.… Nothing quite matches riding a wave.”¹⁸

The ocean holds an unequaled fascination. We can watch its ever-changing face for hours. Every wave is followed by another, and then another. As nineteenth-century French philosopher André Gide wrote, “Each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the receding one.”

It is the same with our growth. Each curve is in part created, and defined, by the one before it and the one that will come after. We’ve anchored. We may stay in port for a while, but ultimately, we must raise anchor and set sail again.

This phase typically feels    

Anchor Takeaways

The next phase of the S Curve of Learning is Anchor. Like a boat coming into harbor, the Anchor stage marks your arrival at the mastery phase. Here, at the high end of your S Curve, you have achieved your objective. Your new behavior is anchored and now a part of you. Your predictive modeling is fluent. Your experience more frequently aligns with your brain’s expectations. You feel a sense of completion on this specific S Curve journey. You have arrived.

Here are three things to maximize your growth.

1. Pause and Reflect

When your growth journey is complete, it can be bittersweet. Gratification is mixed with poignance. It may be disorienting, as you wonder where your life will go next. You may realize that the goals that inspired you to reach this point will no longer motivate you going forward. You may miss the old sense of direction, or the old energy. This is the time to pause, to reflect on your journey. Now that the rush of growth is over, you have the unique opportunity to detect patterns that will help you along future S Curves.

Plan your time of pause and reflection to match the significance of this particular curve. Small accomplishments call for a brief anchoring moment at the end of the day. Life milestones (for example, completing an advanced degree, sending kids to college, moving into the C-suite) could precipitate a more extended personal retreat. Think through the phases of your journey and identify the factors that both inhibited and contributed to your growth. Think about the decisions you made and the actions you took. Which ones accelerated your growth? What would you do differently if you could do it again? Take time to reflect on the meaning of this experience, to acknowledge that you have anchored.

2. Celebrate Your Achievement

Once you’ve paused to consider what you’ve learned and how you’ve grown, it is time to celebrate. You did it! Relish this accomplishment. Again, match your celebration to the situation. Celebrate small S Curves by yourself (for example, in a journal or with daily reflection) and/or with people you love. Celebrate the completion of big S Curves with a wider circle of colleagues, family, or friends. Either way, celebrate. Behavioral scientist B. J. Fogg writes, “Celebration is the best way to create a positive feeling that wires in new habits.”

3. Prepare for the Next S Curve

With your celebration complete, outline what you’ll do next. Is now the time to reconsider compelling opportunities you turned down to stay focused? Are you drawn toward a radically different S Curve such as a career pivot or a move? Anchoring gives you stability and confidence. Chart your next steps from this point of strength. One S Curve flows into another, and then another. Anchor aweigh.