56: Invest in Slow Growth: A Weekend Manifesto
Use weekends not to escape your life, but to shape your future self.
The Sunday Evening Reckoning
It’s 8 PM on Sunday, and you’re scrolling through your phone with that familiar knot in your stomach. Tomorrow is Monday, and somehow another weekend has slipped by in a blur of errands, Netflix, and half-hearted attempts at relaxation. You feel neither rested nor renewed—just vaguely disappointed that you’ve wasted precious time you’ll never return.
Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Most of us treat weekends as an escape from our professional lives, a temporary retreat from the relentless demands of deadlines and meetings. But what if this entire framework is wrong? What if weekends aren’t meant to be a pause button on your growth, but rather the most fertile ground for it?
What if that Sunday evening feeling isn’t just weekend fatigue, but the quiet recognition that you’re capable of much more?
The Compound Effect of Slow Growth
Here’s what most people miss about career development: the most transformative growth doesn’t happen in the fluorescent-lit urgency of office life. It occurs in the quiet spaces where you can think, reflect, and explore without external pressure. It happens when you’re not performing for anyone else.
Slow growth isn’t flashy. It doesn’t announce itself in quarterly reviews or LinkedIn updates. The development happens below the surface, like roots growing deeper before the tree grows taller. This growth doesn’t always translate into immediate metrics come Monday morning, but it’s the foundation for sustainable success.
Consider Sarita, a design director at a Fortune 500 company (name changed for privacy). For two years, she spent every Saturday morning reading philosophy, not business books, design theory, or actual philosophy. Her colleagues thought she was wasting time. However, when her company faced a significant ethical crisis around data privacy, Sarita was the only leader who had a framework for thinking about the moral implications. Her philosophical reading hadn’t just made her smarter—it had made her indispensable.
Or take Marcus, a product manager who dedicates Sunday afternoons to studying adjacent industries. While his peers focused solely on tech, he explored everything from urban planning to behavioral economics. When his company needed to enter a new market, Marcus’s pattern recognition from diverse fields led to breakthrough insights that saved the company millions.
The leaders who remain relevant across decades aren’t necessarily the ones who work the longest hours or respond to emails fastest. They’re the ones who consistently invest in becoming wiser, wider in perspective, and more intentional in their choices. They understand there’s tremendous power in cultivating depth in a world obsessed with speed.
The One-Hour Revolution
Before you worry about overhauling your entire weekend, let me say this: you don’t need to transform everything or sacrifice rest and relationships to revisit your long game. Trying to do too much is the fastest way to abandon the practice entirely.
When my daughter was a baby, there were years when the most I could manage was reading one book every three months—usually in five-minute bursts between naps, dishes, and sheer exhaustion. Setting aside focused time for my development felt like a luxury.
But slow growth, I’ve learned, is precisely that—slow. Its beauty lies in its flexibility. Now that my daughter is 11 and deep into her life as a dancer, our weekends are spent shuttling between rehearsals and competitions. And yet, we take our books and laptops with us. Sometimes we read side by side. Sometimes she dances while I sketch or outline an article in the back row of a high school auditorium.
The point is: I no longer wait for perfect conditions. I carve out an hour—not every weekend, not always in silence, but consistently enough that it accumulates. That one hour, carved out with intention, creates more clarity and momentum than I ever got from trying to power through exhaustion or multitask meaningfully.
This hour might be spent reading a book that challenges my assumptions about leadership, exploring a new concept adjacent to design strategy, or journaling an idea tugging at me. It’s not about maximizing output—it’s about staying connected to the person I’m becoming, even as life keeps shifting around me.
Consistency over intensity. Depth over breadth. That’s how slow growth happens. And it counts—even (primarily) when it occurs between dance routines.
Your First Weekend Hour: A Getting-Started Guide
If you’re ready to try this but don’t know where to begin, here’s your simple roadmap:
Squeeze It In Where You Can: Pick a time that works—even if it changes each week. Flexibility beats perfection.
Choose One Activity: Don’t try to do everything. Choose reading, journaling, or exploring one new topic for your first month.
Protect the Space: Turn off notifications. Let family know this is your focused time. Treat it as seriously as you would an important meeting.
Start Small: If an hour feels overwhelming, start with 30 minutes. Consistency matters more than duration.
Track Your Insights: Keep a simple note in your phone about what you learned or thought about. You’ll be amazed at how these accumulate.
Practical Pathways to Growth
Expand Your Mental Models
Choose books that don’t just confirm what you already believe, but actively challenge your worldview. Read outside your industry, your political bubble, and your comfort zone. A marketing executive might read philosophy, an engineer might explore anthropology, and a consultant might dive into poetry. Each cross-pollination creates new neural pathways and unexpected insights.
Books that have made me pause in the last 30 days:
📘 Hum by Helen Phillips: A surreal, speculative novel that challenges how we perceive noise, silence, and surveillance, provoking reflection on what we tune out as leaders and what we allow to shape our attention.
Why read it: It sharpens your sensitivity to signal vs. noise—an essential skill when designing in complex, overstimulated systems.
📘 The Let Them Theory by Mel & Sawyer Robbins: A radical mindset shift that reframes detachment not as apathy but as clarity—empowering leaders to stop over-functioning and start trusting others to grow.
Why read it: It teaches the art of letting go without disengaging—critical for sustainable leadership and team autonomy.
📘 Originals by Adam Grant: A research-backed exploration of how non-conformists drive change—unpacking what it takes to champion new ideas in risk-averse environments.
Why read it: It’s a playbook for influencing without authority, essential for design leaders guiding organizations through transformation.
📘 Everything Is Fcked* by Mark Manson: A philosophical punch disguised as a self-help book—examining the contradictions of hope, pain, and meaning in a world that resists easy solutions.
Why read it: It’s a grounding read when you're navigating ambiguity—reminding you that discomfort is part of building anything worthwhile.
Return to What Matters
When the week pulls you in every direction, the weekend can be your space to return to yourself, your values, voice, and the work that matters most.
This isn’t about five-year plans or rigid roadmaps. It’s about checking in with the present moment and asking: Am I aligned? Am I energized? Am I moving with intention or just momentum?
Use this time to reconnect with your direction—not in theory, but through small, grounded actions that reflect who you are and how you want to lead.
Here are a few of my go-to practices:
Audit Your Energy: What fueled you last week? What drained you? What do you want more (or less) of in the week ahead? Patterns reveal themselves when we pause long enough to notice what our bodies and minds already know.
Capture One Insight: Don’t wait for the perfect portfolio update—document one decision, an aha moment, or a quiet win while it’s fresh. Small reflections add immense clarity when you give your learning a place to land.
Write Into Clarity: Use journaling to name what feels true right now—not just where you’re going, but why it matters. Some truths only emerge when you give yourself space to hear your voice.
Follow Your Curiosity: Watch, read, or listen to something new. Often, the best ideas come from outside your usual lane. Let surprise be a teacher—new inputs usually unlock stuck thinking and hidden connections.
Make a Done List: Inspired by Oliver Burkeman, this simple practice flips the script: instead of focusing on what’s left undone, take a moment to jot down what you did. You’ve likely moved more than you realize. Progress isn’t always loud, and it rarely looks like a checklist.
Cultivate Deep Work
In our hyperconnected world, the ability to think deeply isn’t just rare—it’s a competitive advantage. During the week, design leaders are often in reactive mode: meetings, Slack pings, deck reviews, and decision loops. But weekends offer a rare window to reconnect with something many of us have lost—sustained attention.
Here’s how to reclaim your capacity for deep thinking:
Choose Your Battle: Pick one complex problem, idea, or question that deserves your undivided mind. This might be a strategic challenge you’ve been avoiding, a system problem that’s been bothering you, or simply a dense article you’ve bookmarked but avoided.
Protect Your Environment: Quiet might be a luxury, but intention isn’t. Claim whatever space you can—your car, a café corner, the dance studio bleachers. Even 20 focused minutes in a semi-chaotic setting can become sacred when you decide to show up fully.
Engage Completely: Wrestle with your chosen topic. Read without skimming, write without editing, think without rushing to conclusions, and let your mind follow tangents and make unexpected connections.
Capture Your Insights: Keep a notebook nearby to jot down breakthrough moments, questions that emerge, or connections you hadn’t seen before. These insights often become the seeds of your most innovative work.
Deep work isn’t just about productivity—it’s about accessing your most original, high-leverage thinking. It’s where pattern recognition, strategy, and creativity converge. And in leadership, that depth is often the difference between simply delivering and truly innovating.
Think of this time not as a luxury, but as essential training. As athletes condition their bodies, we must condition our minds to sustain focus and generate insight in an increasingly distracted world.
Beyond Optimization: The Art of Becoming
This approach to weekends isn’t about optimization in the traditional sense. It’s not about squeezing more productivity out of every available hour or turning rest time into another form of work. Instead, it’s about recognizing that who you’re becoming is as important as what you’re accomplishing.
Conventional wisdom tells us to work hard during the week and recover on weekends. But what if recovery itself could be an act of growth? What if the space you create for yourself—free from external demands and expectations—becomes the laboratory where your most important development happens?
This is fundamentally different from the hustle culture that dominates professional development advice. You’re not trying to do more or go faster. You’re trying to go deeper, think more clearly, and become more intentional about the direction of your career and life.
The Wisdom of Intentional Pauses
In a culture that glorifies busyness, we’re often taught to compartmentalize—parent here, leader there, partner somewhere in between. But real growth doesn’t come from segmenting your life. It comes from integrating it.
The weekend hour becomes more than just time to reflect—it becomes a space to listen to your whole self and ask: What are my different roles trying to teach me?
Maybe parenting teaches you patience that can reshape your leadership. Perhaps work sharpens your clarity to help you show up more fully at home. Maybe a quiet moment in the car reveals a creative spark buried under obligation.
This isn’t about striving—it’s about stitching things together. I am not separating who you are at work and home, but I am noticing the thread that runs through it all.
When you pause with intention, you begin to see the patterns: what’s working, what’s not, what needs to be let go, and what wants to grow.
These aren’t answers you’ll find in the margins of a busy Tuesday. They live in the quiet in-between moments, when you’re not performing, but simply paying attention.
When You Inevitably Fall Off Track
Let’s be honest: you will miss weeks. Life will get in the way. You’ll travel, get sick, or forget. This doesn’t mean the practice has failed—it means you’re human.
Here’s how to restart without guilt:
Don’t Try to Catch Up: Missing three weeks doesn’t mean you need to do three hours next weekend. Just pick up where you left off with your regular one-hour commitment.
Lower the Bar: If life is particularly chaotic, reduce your commitment to 15 minutes. Maintaining the habit matters more than the duration.
Use Transitions: Major life changes (new job, move, relationship changes) are perfect times to restart this practice, as you’re already in a reflective mode.
Remember Why You Started: Reconnect with the feeling that made you want to try this in the first place—that Sunday evening sense that you’re capable of more.
Building a Practice, Not a Program
The goal isn’t to create another rigid system or add pressure to your weekends. Instead, think of this as building a gentle practice—a recurring appointment with your future self. Some weekends, that hour might be spent reading. Others, it might be spent walking and thinking, or having a deep conversation with someone whose perspective challenges your own.
The consistency matters more than the specific activity. What matters is the regular commitment to growth driven by curiosity rather than external expectations, personal vision rather than professional demands.
Over time, this practice creates something unexpected: a sense of agency over your development. Instead of feeling like your career is happening to you, you begin to feel like you’re actively shaping it. Instead of reactive professional development driven by immediate needs, you’re building capabilities for challenges you can’t yet see coming.
The Long View
Choosing slow growth is almost countercultural in a world that rewards quick wins and immediate results. It requires faith that small, consistent investments in yourself will compound in ways that aren’t immediately visible or measurable.
However, the leaders who have sustained impact over decades understand this principle deeply. They know that the person they’re becoming is the foundation for everything they’ll accomplish. They invest in slow growth not because it’s efficient, but because it’s transformative.
The executive who spent years reading philosophy didn’t know she’d face an ethical crisis. The product manager studying adjacent industries didn’t know his company would need to pivot. But when those moments came, they were ready—not because they had predicted the future, but because they had prepared themselves to think clearly under pressure.
This is what slow growth offers: not just knowledge or skills, but the capacity to respond thoughtfully to whatever comes next. In a rapidly changing world, that capacity might be the most valuable asset you can develop.
Your Next Sunday Evening
So this weekend, consider setting aside just one hour—not to escape your life, but to consciously shape it. Not to become more productive, but to become more thoughtful, aware, and intentional.
Picture yourself next Sunday evening, not with that familiar knot of regret, but with the quiet satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve invested in who you’re becoming. Picture the version of yourself five years from now, making decisions with wisdom you’re building today, solving problems with insights you’re gathering right now.
The future you—making decisions five years from now—will thank you for the investment. But more importantly, the current you will start to feel the shift almost immediately: from reactive to intentional, from scattered to focused, from busy to purposeful.
What will you choose to grow slowly? The answer to that question might shape everything that comes next.
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