Pregnancy is Not a Group Activity (And Other Inconvenient Truths About Time)

I once spent three months learning to play a single piece on the piano—Bach's Invention No. 1 in C Major.¹ Each morning, I'd sit at the bench with my coffee growing cold, stumbling through the same sixteen measures. My fingers moved through the notes with all the grace of a drunk octopus trying to text.² For weeks, nothing. My muscle memory seemed to be on permanent vacation. Friends would ask about my progress, and I'd shrug, feeling foolish for having no victories to report.³

Then one Tuesday morning, something clicked. Not gradually, not after a breakthrough moment of inspiration, but suddenly, as if my hands had been secretly practicing while I slept.⁴ The melody flowed. The counterpoint sang. What had been mechanical suddenly became musical.

This wasn't about practice making perfect. This was about something far more mysterious: the hidden architecture of becoming.

The Invisible Assembly Line

Warren Buffett's business partner Charlie Munger once observed something profound about expertise: it doesn't accumulate linearly.⁵ Most people expect improvement to look steady, measurable, always upward like a staircase. But real mastery operates more like compound interest, where 99% of the gains happen in the final 1% of the time.⁶

The piano taught me this isn't just about skill acquisition. It's about how all meaningful change actually works. We live in a culture obsessed with visible progress, with metrics and milestones and monthly reviews. We want our growth to be trackable, our development to be deliverable. But the most important transformations happen in the spaces between our awareness, in what neuroscientists call the "default mode network," where our brains continue processing and connecting long after we've stopped consciously trying.

Consider the last time you truly changed your mind about something important. Did it happen during a heated debate? In the middle of reading a compelling article? Probably not. More likely, it happened weeks later, while you were washing dishes or walking the dog, when some unnoticed part of your mind had been quietly rearranging the furniture of your beliefs.⁷

The Pregnancy Paradox

There's a beautiful brutality in biological systems: they refuse to be rushed.⁸ You cannot make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant, because gestation is not just a constraint on speed; it's a condition for emergence. It's the phase of becoming where nothing visible seems to be happening, and yet everything essential is.

The problem is not just that we're impatient. It's that we've internalized a broken theory of time.⁹ In our default model, time is treated as a fungible input: something you can break apart and reassign like Lego bricks. Need something done twice as fast? Double the team. Triple the meetings. Add more standups. Divide the work into smaller and smaller sprints until even the thinking happens on a timer.¹⁰ The result is a performance of urgency, an artificial choreography of progress that rarely reflects what's actually unfolding beneath the surface, if anything is allowed to unfold at all.

What we rarely admit is that real progress, the kind that involves uncertainty, incubation, and some degree of psychic dismemberment, operates on a completely different axis. It doesn't care how many resources you allocate. It doesn't move linearly. And it certainly doesn't give a shit about your QBR.¹¹

Take trust, for instance. You can't expedite trust. You can incentivize compliance, maybe even secure enthusiastic participation with enough snacks and swag. But the deep alignment,the kind that makes someone tell the truth when it's inconvenient or own the hard thing when no one's looking. That takes time. Not clock time, but time-in-context. Time spent navigating discomfort, ambiguity, and the quiet horror of being actually known by other people.¹²

Cells divide. Synapses fire. Shapes form in silence. There's no visible win state, no deliverable to attach to an email, no progress bar inching across a screen. Just a slow, molecular choreography refusing to be optimized.

This isn't inefficiency. It's how living systems work. And here's the uncomfortable truth most professionals learn only after a midlife crisis or a founder-induced breakdown: most of what we call productivity is just the nervous avoidance of conditions that would allow real emergence to happen.¹³

The same principle governs every meaningful change in our lives. When we decide to become more patient, more confident, more creative, we're not flipping a switch. We're initiating a gestation process. New neural pathways need time to strengthen. Old patterns need time to weaken. The self we're becoming needs time to grow in the dark spaces of our unconscious minds.

Yet we treat personal development as if it were software development, expecting iterative releases, sprint reviews, and measurable improvements every two weeks.¹⁴ We become frustrated when our meditation practice doesn't immediately calm our anxiety, when our networking efforts don't instantly expand our opportunities, when our attempts at vulnerability don't immediately deepen our relationships.¹⁵

The Paradox of Invisible Work

Here's where things get interesting from a professional standpoint. The most valuable work often looks like nothing at all.¹⁶ The executive who spends time thinking instead of doing meetings. The designer who sits quietly observing people instead of immediately jumping to solutions. The manager who asks questions instead of providing answers.

In knowledge work, we've inherited industrial metaphors: throughput, efficiency, productivity. But consciousness doesn't operate like a factory floor. Insights cannot be scheduled. Creativity cannot be optimized. The best ideas often emerge not from focused effort but from what psychologists call "diffuse attention," the mental state we enter when we're not trying to solve anything at all.

This creates a professional paradox: the behaviors that lead to breakthrough thinking often appear indistinguishable from laziness.¹⁷ Taking long walks. Staring out windows. Having seemingly unproductive conversations. Sitting with problems instead of immediately attacking them.

This is where the metaphor turns from funny to slightly menacing. The real danger isn't that we try to do the impossible. It's that we start to believe the impossible was actually reasonable, and any failure to deliver it must be a personal flaw.¹⁸ You didn't ship that feature on time? You're disorganized. You haven't found your purpose yet? You're lazy or unclear. You're still trying to figure out what this thing is? You're not strategic enough. Or focused enough. Or aligned enough. Or—God help you—fast enough.

As if slowness were a moral defect.

As if the only valid timeline were the one set in a quarterly planning session by people who still think ideation is a verb.¹⁹

Eventually, we learn to perform progress. To anticipate deadlines instead of discovery. To declare alignment before doing the terrifying work of excavating what we actually believe.

What if the most important question isn't "What did you accomplish today?" but "What did you allow to develop today?"

The Maturation of Meaning

The ancient Greeks distinguished between two types of time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is clock time: linear, measurable, finite. Kairos is meaningful time: the right moment, the pregnant pause, the fullness of possibility. Most of our lives are spent in chronos, but all of our growth happens in kairos.

Think about the last time you had a genuine insight about yourself. How long had you been unknowingly preparing for it: the books you'd read months earlier, the conversations you'd had, the experiences you'd accumulated? All of it was composting in your mind, breaking down and recombining until it became something new.²⁰

This is why wisdom cannot be downloaded. Why leadership cannot be learned from a weekend seminar. Why emotional intelligence cannot be acquired through bullet points and frameworks. These capacities require what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called "dwelling," a kind of patient presence that allows meaning to emerge organically rather than forcing it through effort.

The Art of Productive Patience

So how do we honor the gestation process without falling into passivity? How do we remain active participants in our own development while accepting we cannot control the timeline?

The answer lies in understanding the difference between effort and force.²¹ Effort is showing up consistently, creating conditions for growth, maintaining the practices that nourish development. Force is trying to rush the process, demanding immediate results, abandoning approaches because they don't yield quick wins.

A gardener doesn't make plants grow—they create conditions for growth. They prepare soil, provide water, ensure adequate light. Then they wait, trusting in processes they cannot see or control. The root system develops in darkness long before the first green shoots appear above ground.

What would it mean to become gardeners of our own growth? To focus less on immediate results and more on creating sustainable conditions for long-term development?

You can't make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

You can, however, create the illusion of progress by attempting it. You can flood the room with activity. You can point to charts and dashboards. You can say "we're making moves." And when it inevitably fails, you can act surprised, as if the problem wasn't baked into the assumption.²²

Meanwhile, the real work—the slow, gestational kind—is happening somewhere else. Underground. Off-cycle. Beyond metrics.

The Invitation to Incubate

Perhaps the most radical act in our achievement-obsessed culture is to embrace the power of apparent inaction.²³ To trust that meaningful change is often happening precisely when we cannot see it. To understand that the most important growth occurs not in the moments of breakthrough but in the long stretches of seemingly nothing in between.

We treat creative processes like manufacturing cycles. We treat relationships like contracts. We treat time like an adversary to be outmaneuvered, instead of the medium in which everything meaningful is made.²⁴

The next time you find yourself frustrated with the pace of your progress: whether in mastering a skill, changing a habit, or developing a new capacity. Remember the piano. Remember the baby. Remember that complexity assembles itself according to laws we didn't write and timelines we don't control.

But here's what no one tells you about embracing this slower rhythm: it requires a kind of faith that borders on the absurd.²⁵ Faith that your invisible efforts matter when everyone around you is shipping visible products. Faith that depth trumps speed when your performance review measures deliverables. Faith that the thing taking shape in the dark will eventually justify all those months of what looked suspiciously like stalling.

This is the part that keeps me up sometimes—maybe it won't. Maybe some gestations just fail. Maybe some insights never emerge. Maybe some versions of ourselves we're trying to become were never viable to begin with.²⁶ The biological metaphor breaks down here, doesn't it? Because failed pregnancies end in grief, but failed becomings? Those just fade into the background noise of things we tried and abandoned, stories we tell ourselves about roads not taken, potential squandered.

Which brings us to the real question: not the inspiring one about what you're gestating, but the harder one about what you're willing to risk on processes you cannot predict or control. What are you prepared to invest in darkness? How long will you water seeds that might never sprout?

Because if you're honest about it, the scariest part isn't the waiting. It's the possibility that all this patient cultivation, all this careful tending of invisible growth—what if it's just an elaborate way of avoiding the simpler truth that sometimes there's nothing there to gestate at all?²⁷