I have been there. Clinging to the edge of the pool, telling myself I was swimming.
Learning a new language is humbling in ways I did not fully anticipate. The anxiety is real. The frustration is real. The quiet voice that whispers, “You are not good enough at this,” is relentless. I applied everything I knew, all my comfortable frameworks, and they got me precisely nowhere.
Then I came across Jhumpa Lahiri’s extraordinary memoir, In Other Words. A Bangladeshi woman, raised in New York, who one day chose to fully immerse herself in Italian. Not study it. Not dabble. Immerse.
She describes the lake metaphor vividly. Clinging to the shoreline feels safe. You are technically in the water. But the real experience, the growth, the transformation, only comes when you push off and swim toward the other side.
What struck me most was not her fluency. It was her identity shift. Her recent books are not translated from English. They are conceived, felt, and written in Italian. New neural pathways. A different rhythm. A different her.
That is not language acquisition. That is reinvention.
I think about this often with the founders and leaders I work with. So many of us are clinging to the edges of a familiar lake. Using the same strategies that once worked. Applying known frameworks to genuinely new problems. Staying close enough to shore to feel productive, yet never quite crossing to the other side.
Growth rarely lives on the edge where it is comfortable.
The question I sit with, and that I invite you to sit with, is this: where are you hugging the shoreline? And what would it actually cost you to let go?
