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Slow growth leads to high quality

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Most young tree saplings spend their early decades under the shade of their mother’s canopy. Limited sunlight means they grow slowly. Slow growth leads to dense, hard wood.

But something interesting happens if you plant a tree in an open field: free from the shade of bigger trees, the sapling gorges on sunlight and grows fast.

Fast growth leads to soft, airy wood that never had time to densify. And soft, airy wood is a breeding ground for fungus and disease. “A tree that grows quickly rots quickly and therefore never has a chance to grow old,” forester Peter Wohlleben wrote. Haste makes waste.

Or consider animal growth.

Take two groups of identical baby fish. Put one in abnormally cold water, the other in abnormally warm water. There’s a certain temperature on either end that does something interesting: Fish living in cold water will grow slower than normal, while those in warm water will grow faster than normal.

Put both groups back in regular-temperature water and they’ll eventually converge to become normal, full-sized adults.

But then something astounding happens.

Fish with slowed-down growth in their early years go on to live 30 percent longer than average. Those with artificial, supercharged growth early on die 15 percent earlier than average.

That’s what a team of biologists from Glasgow University once found.
The cause isn’t complicated. Supercharged growth can lead to tissue damage and, as the biologists put it, “may only be achieved by diversion of resources away from maintenance and repair of damaged biomolecules.” Slowed-down growth does the opposite, “allowing an increased allocation to maintenance and repair.”

“You might well expect a machine built in haste to fail quicker than one put together carefully and methodically, and our study suggests that this may be true for bodies too,” Neil Metcalfe, one of the researchers, said.

An important thing about this topic is that most great things in life—from love to careers to investing—gain their value from two things: patience and scarcity. Patience to let something grow, and scarcity to admire what it grows into.