3rd June 2022

What Growth and Alchemy Have in Common

How many times have you seen a job description or a company name in someone's Instagram bio? Labor is and has always been more than just a set of activities you do to pay your bills. It is also one of the most accessible ways to change the Self. That's a dangerous line that more often than not we cross: letting labels define who we are instead of using them to shape reality according to our own will.

But work changes us in more ways than just labeling. As you immerse yourself in your trade and refine your skills, you are bound to emerge differently. Understanding the capabilities of a tool will expand your horizon of possibilities. When a dog faces a car, it does not see a tool for moving around with ease. It doesn't understand that it can now travel previously unimaginable distances in such a short period of time. Living without access to the amount of information we have through our phones is almost incognoscible. Our tools suddenly become a part of our subjective reality - like a character from a Metroidvania, we can revisit old parts of the map and find previously hidden treasures.

Jobs are no different than tools in that sense. In fact, one could argue that jobs are a collection of tools and experiences shared by people trying to achieve similar goals (albeit with meaningful differences in the tactics and particularities of each company). A doctor exists to save or improve lives through diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases. Their tools, both physical and mental, are derived from tons of different traditions and the collective experience of thousands of different medics. Anyone that extensively studies medicine is bound to have their worldview changed by this. The outer world reflects and transforms the inner world.

The alchemists of old understood this really well. Transmutation of matter was, in fact, only a reflex of the alchemist's inner transformation. To turn lead, the metal that symbolizes matter, into gold, the alchemist himself had to change. And once an alchemist could do this transformation effortlessly, using it to grow rich would seem pointless. One could argue that for the real alchemists, gold was the least important part of alchemy.

This most likely happens during any activity in which you can enter a state of flow. Going to the gym, driving, skateboarding - every activity can act as a mirror to the self, with the same understanding being reached through different ways

Kanye understands the hermetic principle of correspondence.

Lately, I've been thinking about how I'm changing by working in growth/how working in growth has been transforming me. I'm not sure how much control I have in the process, but I like to think that I've been gently directing some of the changes.

Overall, I feel less certain about things, and more comfortable dealing with uncertainty as well. Becoming better at tracking data and using it for every decision that I do feels like a must. Not fooling myself and letting this data make me think that I'm in control of the business growth rate is a conscious decision.

I'm definitely a lot more technical now than I was a year ago. I'm capable of understanding more complex topics without being scared of how it works.

It's also getting increasingly harder to track all of these changes. It's easy to look back to years ago and say "Yeah, my opinion about this subject has changed" or "Wow, I'm much better at this today". It's not as simple to look back and measure how much more comfortable I'm at dealing with ambiguity or if my opinion about this is more or less fluid today than it was a few months ago. Have I ever had this thought process? How did the voice inside my head change?

And I'm also curious about how this process would look like if I chose another profession. My tools, my pool of shared experiences, the processes used to solve problems - how much of this is now really mine?

Anyway, I have more questions than answers for the time being. And I'm sure the answers that I think I have will change again in the future because such is the nature of life. As the alchemists used to say, solve et coagula.