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11 Fascinating Plateau Strategies for Uplifting Your Plateaued Stagnant Life and Career

11 Fascinating Plateau Strategies for Uplifting Your Plateaued Stagnant Life and Career. Why my life is stagnant? Why am I not growing in career? Why I am failing to uplift myself? How to come out of this deep hole? Can I achieve growth in the static life?

What is a Career and Life Plateaus?

A plateau is a flat area. Growth is a buzzword these days. Everyone wants to grow in life, succeed, grow their wealth, grow socially, grow their personality, and so on. However, any growth requires fuel(energy). Energy is not infinite. And therefore, any growth is halted after a certain period. Irrespective of how much you try to press the accelerator, your car won’t increase its speed beyond its limit. Even at the top speed, the car would appear to run flat.

The point where growth starts to become flat is called the saturation point. When any system or reaching the saturation point, it consumes more energy to maintain that level because while growing, there is momentum and acceleration that push a system, acting as additional energy. However, after the saturation point is reached, the growth is sustained for some time, and eventually, there is a slide.

An example graph of customer acquisition showing growth region and plateaued region..

In the example graph above, the blue region is the growth region, whereas the red region is the plateaued region.

Why does a Plateau in any part of life make us nervous?

All our senses and perceptions are based on relativity. That is, we feel like moving when our speed exceeds the speed of the reference elements. For example, if you are driving a car at 60kmph and there is another car that catches up to you and starts driving at the same speed, as you look outside the window to the other car and see the other car moving with you, you feel as if you are not moving.

Whatever growth we have achieved, and at whatever speed, the plate at any point makes us feel like we are not moving in life, and therefore we feel dead. The motivation of the brain to come out of this plateau is less.

Examples of Plateaus in the History and the Consequences

From 335 BC onwards, Macedonian king Alexander the Great started one of our history’s most ruthless military journeys. From Persia, Asia Minor to Mesopotamia, his army was on a rampage till the Indian campaign in 327BC. The army won battles in the Swat regions, Punjab. But it lost its steam and plateaued by 324 BC when it was to take on Magadh. It backtracked. Not long after then, Alexender died, starting a slump of his emperor for 40 years.

After crossing 1B in sales by 1983, Apple II was growing crazily. But since 1994, the sales stopped growing, creating the PLATEAU, and losses took the company to near bankruptcy in 97.

Thomas Edison filed nine patents in 1872. Next year, 39. By 1883, it reached 105. Then PLATEAUED till 1890 with avg 20 patents/year. Finally, a slump started till it reached one patent/year in 1920.

Practical examples of a plateau

You start on a weight loss journey. You lose fast and then stop losing weight. Then you get frustrated and start gaining weight back.
You go all out to persuade your partner, and once the relationship reaches its peak, it plateaus.

From war to science, from business to love, every growth stops at a point and plateaus, which starts the slump that averages out the growth.

Problems with a plateau

  1. Life appears flat and stagnant.
  2. We tend to push harder and more to overcome the plateau, resulting in more energy loss than growth and slowly exhausting us.
  3. Life is all about moving. A plateau makes us feel dead because we don’t perceive moving.
  4. In a plateau, even those with slow growth, and at a much below level than you, appear to be alive as they grow.
  5. Plateau brings a feeling of death and therefore unlocks mental insecurities.
  6. Over-pushing and overtrying in plateau frustrate us, eventually leading to depression.
  7. Sustained frustration makes us angry and hypertensive over some time.
  8. With all the above factors combined, we start falling and degrowing.
  9. Because life is all about change, staying in the same place, irrespective of how secure, safe, and glittering the place is, makes life appear boring and meaningless.

After every growth comes to a plateau, and after every plateau, there is an immense risk and possibility of a slump. However, self-help gurus, motivators, coaches, and the billion-dollar self-improvement industry do not talk about the plateau and stagnancy, as they hardly understand life philosophically. It is a great business opportunity when you promise someone that you will take him/her from point A in life to point B. However, promising someone that you will help him/her to stay where they are is hardly attractive to people.

Moving from one point in life to another is unreal, unsustainable, frustrating, and irritating, as this makes current life unacceptable. On the other hand, staying at the same level, irrespective of the height of the level, is frustrating, too, because it makes life feel dead and meaningless. This is why the psychology of plateau is so important to accept and understand.

So how to deal with a flat life and plateau situation?

1. Documenting and Teaching

The reason we have reached this far as a race because our ancestors have left behind the knowledge and understanding the world for us so that we do not have to start from zero. You have reached to a certain milestone in life. There are plenty of challenges you have faced to reach to where you are. Take time now to document all the experiences and write them so that others who wants to reach to the level you are currently in, would find it easier to reach to your level. This documentation will also give you a self comfort and acceptance. This will eliminate the stress you are experiencing due to plateau.

2. Observation.

When we run, and accelerate and push towards the growth, we often stop paying attention to the details. The faster a car is driven, the higher your concentration is towards the front road, and not in you, or around you. Plateau gives you an opportunity to slow down and start observing your surroundings, your internal word, becoming conscious with your heart rate and other parameters.

Understanding yourself will become an asset for you when you take the next leap.

3. Challenge and problem identification of the current level.

Every level, even a top speed has its own challenges. For example a startup company in growth has the problem of customer retention along with acquisition. Focus on identifying the problems that are keeping you away from comfort at the current level and making you to invest more energy looking for growth. Solving these problems to make the current stage self-sustainable would give you the needed time and peace to go for the next level.

4. Reading about how to solve the current challenges.

Knowledge is the vehicle, or rather only vehicle that can transport you from one level in life to other. When you are growing, often you have less time in learning. You are focussed on the growth and pay a blind eye to knowledge acquisition. Later focussing only on the growth becomes a habit and when you do not see the growth, you get anxious. The way to deal with this anxiety is to start deep-reading again and start correlating your current stage with your reading. The beauty of books are that when you read them at different stages of life, they give you different meaning. Books give meaning to experiences, and this meaning is essential for your brain to accept the current stage.

Hence deep-study.

5. Slowing down the acceleration, and letting an intentional hump come, so that momentum will supply additional energy when accelerating.

Whether writing, reading, observing, automating, for anything you need time and energy. If you try to keep pushing, you will loose all your time, emotions and energy into the effort to grow. The principle of growth is that, it is driven by knowledge and momentum, and can’t be sustained by pushing or by infusing more money or energy into the growth. Therefore to overcome the current plateau, you need to slow down, to preserve energy, and save some time to prepare for the next stage.

6. Changing the smooth road to more irregular roads with more ups and down. Friction will provide additional energy for the next level of growth.

We often get into a comfort zone after reaching a milestone in life. Every milestone has its own challenges and responsibilities. We become so occupied with the responsibilities, that we seldom want any anomaly or changes. We want things to be perfect and everything in place. This focus on hyper-perfectionism then leads to more anxiety which eventually triggers the downfall.

Fill your road with bumps, ups and downs and allow your journey to be rough, rather than being smooth. This rough road will supply the fuel, and also keep your brain more observant.

7. Strengthening the fundamentals.

There is a proverb, “what got you here won’t take you there.” And still there are some fundamentals which will remain a guiding force throughout life, like the principle of law of thermodynamics. In the growth stage, one often gets entangled into a subjective reality, and goes away from the objective truth. Focus on fundamentals, and objective truths. Such objective truths are the ones which drives you. This also gives you a more realistic theoretical understanding of the world, and the reasons which are driving your subjective reality.

Focussing on laws, rules and principles are the ones which will guide you for the next stage.

8. Build leverages out of the current stage.

A leverage is something that you trust and that trusts you. Because trust is fundamentally the most expensive and hard social currency, it takes years to build this leverage. Once you have trust, people want to associate more values with that trust. For example, being citizen of a country is a leverage. You trust the country, its constitution, and the administration that follows the constitution. Considering your country as a leverage will enable you to use other resources of the country, in exchange of contributing towards the resources of the country. You won’t have to travel from one place to another place. Even though you are settled in your country, you can continue to see that as a leverage and build values.

9. Focus on adding more value and deriving more value out of the current stage.

We are often constrained by the valuation and physical money part of any state. Money and valuations are extrinsic whereas values are intrinsic. Honesty, integrity, care, concern for the future, respecting the planet, educating more people, offering opportunities for people in order to increase livelihood, and so on. Valuation benefits you and a handful few around you, which never gets translated to the larger society. If you drive a bike, you can accelerate it to the top speed very fast. However, if you are driving a bull cart that is carrying 10 people, then reaching a top speed will become a journey. The advantage in the later case is that at least 10 more people will reach their destination.

The stage you are in then can be leveraged to create more values for more people. In that way your social currency will increase. Social currency is also a fuel that will drive your next stage.

10. Eliminate the unnecessary baggage to prepare yourself for the next stage.

We often carry a burden of manipulated gratitude. We often feel that because someone has done something for us, we have to carry that gratitude throughout the life. Helping people is part of our social responsibilities. As much we serve the society, the more fruit we get. Serving the society also means service to any needy.

Serving the society means helping anyone whom we can help with our additional energy, time, and emotions. If you carry the burden that you have to keep returning the favour, then you and the one who has contributed to your growth will be struck in a zeo-sum transaction. Once someone has helped you to grow, use the growth to rip more benefits, and then return part of the benefit to the one who has helped you. Growing more simply means that you have to travel again, make another journey.

Not always, not everyone would be intending to be part of your all the journeys. Do not complain, and do not whim, crib or cry about people left behind. Do not put yourself into a false belief that you have to carry people in your shoulder. Have the commitment to distribute the benefit of your new growth, not carrying people around. Remember, to reach to the space, a spacecraft always has to shed three rockets.

11. Accept where you are today and acknowledge the gift of life to bring you to this point.

Growth is part of thriving. Life is about surviving and thriving. Surviving is also about acknowledging and accepting the life as it is at this moment. We often get into a habit of complaining about the life. Most people keep grieviences against the stage of life they are in. Such disliking also is a result of comparing yourself with the others. There are thousands of dimensions of life. And there will always be those who will be better in some dimensions or the other in comparision to you. This is because of the law of thermodynamics. You can’t get everything right. Cost of something has to be given by impairment in other things.

Conclusion

Plateau is as important part of life, as much as growth. Even earth slows down at the distant point of the orbit, and then again it accelerates towards as it approaches the part of the Orbit closer to the Sun. Life will be comprising of ups and downs, smooth and humps, rough and rouges. The art of living is simply enjoying the journey rather than focussing on the destination and the speed at which we reach to the destination. Because if the journey is right, one or the other day, we shall eventually reach our destination.

Consider plateau as one of the intermediate destination. Cherish the destination. Relish the fact that you have reached here. Then again start moving towards the next destination. Even if the next journey of life is through the down, it is still the journey of life, your life, and it is still beautiful. Enjoy and celebrate life.

Passionate, Accountable Student for Life

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