Milestones Hardly Matter

My son started walking four months “late.”

As first-time parents, we were anxious. Every other child his age seemed to be up and running while he was still crawling.

But when he finally did start walking, he didn’t wobble. He didn’t fall. He just walked.

As if he had been rehearsing for months.

A few months later, his speech development was ahead of most kids his age.

And today, he’s just a perfectly normal kid. Neither ahead nor behind in any meaningful way.

Developmental milestones actually mean very little from a time point of view. Although, it is great tool to generate more revenue from doctor consultations and keep parents engaged. (topic for another day, perhaps). They’re useful as rough guidelines, but they say almost nothing about what comes next. Look back after a year or two and those anxious moments disappear. Just like a single-day dip in a long-term stock chart, it barely registers.

We make the same mistake in leadership.

We observe someone at one point in time and try to forecast their entire trajectory from that snapshot. We decide who is going to be a rockstar and who is going to be a bust.

But growth doesn’t follow a calendar.

People develop unevenly. Some “late bloomers” scale heights nobody thought was possible while some “high potentials” peak early and plateau.

What looks like delay is often just incubation.

And what looks like a fast start can be a short run.

We keep trying to predict long-term potential from short-term movement, when all it really takes is patience to see how someone walks once they’re ready.