Breaking the Spiral: Why Progress Beats Perfection

Involution, that inward turn where we optimize the same ground over and over, feels productive. We refine our processes, polish our presentations, perfect our pitches. But we're not actually advancing. We're just competing more intensely for the same space.

The antidote isn't working harder within existing boundaries. It's stepping outside them.

This means asking different questions. Not "How can we improve our current approach?" but "What approach would make this one obsolete?" Not "How do we compete better?" but "What would eliminate the competition?"

In business, involution shows up when entire industries chase incremental improvements while missing fundamental shifts. Remember when mobile phones got smaller and smaller, until someone asked what phones could do rather than just how small they could get?

In our own work, it appears when we're endlessly refining the same proposal, optimizing the same campaign, tweaking the same strategy. The work feels important because it's effortful. But effort spent deepening a rut isn't the same as progress.

The path out requires discomfort. It means abandoning expertise we've built, walking away from optimization we've mastered, and venturing into uncertainty where we're beginners again.

But that's where growth lives; not in the perfection of the known, but in the exploration of what's next.