Darnell slipped quietly into class and slumped into his chair without even saying hello.
“Everything all right, Darnell?” Mr. Griffin asked.
“Do I have to talk about it?”
“Of course not. But your Mastermind group is here if you want them, and they haven’t let you down so far.”
Darnell squeezed his eyes shut and said, “I hate being the fat kid.”
“I thought you weren’t motivated by weight any longer,” Jarod said.
“That was before Hugh rejected me because I was too fat.”
“Who’s Hugh?” I asked.
“The owner of Shake Your Smoothie over on Main Street.” Darnell gritted his teeth. “He needs someone in the afternoons, but doesn’t want any fat kids.”
“He said that?” Christy said.
“He said it’s a health-food place, so he wants people who look healthy and fit.”
“That’s discrimination!” Christy said. “He can’t get away with that.”
“Let’s get real, Christy. I’m fat. Really fat. If I were him, I wouldn’t want me either.”
“Why’d you want this job, Darnell?” Mr. Griffin asked.
“Hugh is an expert on healthy eating. The job sounds like a great way to learn. Plus I could be drinking healthy smoothies after school rather than watching my family gorge on pizza.”
“Did you tell him that?” I asked.
“Nooo.” Darnell flushed as though reliving the encounter. “I shut my trap before I said anything I’d regret and got out of there.”
“Seems to me,” Mr. Griffin said, “he rejected you for a good reason.”
“How can you say that?” Christy said.
“Hugh merely pointed out the obvious, and Darnell stormed out of there with his tail between his legs.”
“Come on, Mr. Griffin,” Christy slapped her desk. “You’re not being fair!”
“Fair? You think Darnell needs fair?” Mr. Griffin asked. “Would you want to get a trophy every time you showed up to a meet?”
“Of course not, but this is different. The guy didn’t even give Darnell a chance to jump in the pool.”
“Or maybe Darnell didn’t give him a reason to believe he could swim.”
The next day I found Christy and Darnell talking together in the hallway. I was used to seeing Christy surrounded by a pack of friends and had never seen her hanging out with Darnell on school grounds—outside of math of course.
I came up to them just in time to see Darnell pour green sludge from one water bottle to the next, and Christy pass him a five dollar bill. I felt like I’d walked in on a drug deal. “What’s that?” I pointed to the bottle.
“Our new breakfast,” Christy said. “Darnell’s making it for both of us.”
“It’s a smoothie with kale, banana, blueberries, and spirulina,” Darnell said.
“What’s spirulina?”
“Algae.” Darnell somehow kept a straight face. “Hugh told me about it. He says it’s the most powerful superfood he knows for injuries.”
“Hugh?” I asked. “From Shake Your Smoothie? The guy who rejected you?”
“Yep. I thought about what Mr. Griffin said. I went back in there after school and told him that if his shop was for people who were fit and healthy, then I agreed that I’d be a poor fit. But if his store was for people working their butts off to become fit, he would not find a better example than me. Then I showed him what I looked like a few months ago.” Darnell pulled out his phone and flipped to some pictures from earlier in the year.
I’d forgotten just how big Darnell had been—the difference was tremendous. “Did you really show him the pictures with the numbers on your chest?”
“Absolutely. He loved it. He even asked if I’d be willing to do that again in the store. He thought it would be both a fun gimmick and a real inspiration for his customers.”
“So he gave you the job?”
“I challenged him to give me a one week trial, and he agreed. But when he sees how committed I am, I have no doubt he’ll make it permanent.”
I pointed to the sludge. “And that stuff tastes good?”
“Well, the spirulina doesn’t, but you barely notice it. Everything else is delicious. Wanna try?”
“No thanks.” I turned to Christy. “This is part of your recovery, I take it?”
“Whatever my dietitian recommends, I’m having.” Christy squeezed Darnell’s arm.
Mr. Griffin had told me that Darnell would find himself becoming more popular because he knew what he wanted and was going at it with abandon. In truth, seeing him stand there next to Christy, he no longer looked so out of place as he would have a few months earlier. His weight was probably down 25 to 30 pounds, but it was his newfound confidence, even more than his thinned-down frame, that made him look at home.
Christy gulped some. “It’s good, Kelvin. Go on, give it a try.”
It was easier to say no to Darnell than to Christy. I took her water bottle and tipped a bit of the sludge back into my mouth. Nothing came out. I held the water bottle at a steeper angle, but it still wasn’t moving.
“That’s the blueberry,” Darnell said. “It’s full of pectin, which can make this pretty solid. Tilt it back farther.”
So I did, until a big glob fell out onto my face. I slurped some down, then wiped the green slime from my lips. “Certainly tastes better than it looks,” I said.
“Tastes better than it looks,” Darnell repeated. “Perhaps that will be the name of my new restaurant.”
Christy laughed and gave his arm another squeeze. “Off to English.”
“Giant storm is on its way,” Jarod said as he walked into class. “Could be the biggest of the winter.”
“No wonder you’ve got a spring in your step,” Mr. Griffin said.
“Yep. The winter has been feast or famine. I got lucky that the first frost came so late this year—it really extended my mowing season—but that’s long gone now. There’s no regular work with plowing. After weeks of famine, I’m looking forward to some feast.”
“Do you feel prepared?”
“Fairly. During that last storm, I thought of a number of things I could do better, but I’m kind of out of ideas. I’d love to hear if my Mastermind group has any suggestions.”
“I could start earlier,” I said.
“Oh, no doubt.” Jarod rustled my hair. “I intend to get you up at the crack of dawn this time—if I let you sleep that late.”
“Could you charge any more?” Christy asked.
“A little. Last time, I undercharged early in the day, but there’s only so high I can go before my customers turn elsewhere.”
“Remember how long it took us to get gas last time?” I said.
“Yeah, we drove by three closed gas stations until we came to one that was open.”
“What if you bought a couple of gas cans and kept them in the back of the pickup?”
“I like that. I could easily save a half hour of plowing time doing that. Anyone have anything else?”
No one spoke.
“Mr. Griffin, you have any ideas for me?”
“Many. But I’m all too aware that if I start sharing my ideas, all of you will bottle up and stop developing your own.”
“Oh, come on. Can’t you at least give me a hint?”
“A hint?” Mr. Griffin began the pacing we’d come to know as the sign of a new lesson. “Very well. There are two types of growth, incremental and exponential.”
“Do you think you could give me a hint in English?”
“Think of incremental growth as growing within your existing constraints, and exponential growth as eliminating at least one constraint.”
“Sorry, Mr. Griffin, but I haven’t the slightest clue what you’re talking about.”
“Tell me, what limits the number of driveways you can plow in a storm?”
“There’s only so much I can do. Last time I worked an 18 hour day, and I really can’t do any more than that.”
“Exactly. The number of hours you can work in a day is a constraint. By carrying extra gas you’ve figured out how to get more productive time out of those 18 hours, but you haven’t eliminated the constraint. You’re only making yourself incrementally more productive. Thus, incremental growth.
“The same applies to charging a little bit more per driveway. You haven’t removed the upper limit of how much people are willing to pay, you’ve just inched incrementally closer to that limit.”
“So what would be an example of exponential growth?”
“Replacing your snow blower with a plow. With the snow blower, you could only do so many driveways per day. That was a constraint. When you switched to the plow, you completely shattered that constraint.”
“Well, sort of. I’m still constrained by how many I can do in a day.”
“Of course. When you destroy one constraint, another will always come to take its place. But the upper limit of the plow is much higher than that of the snow blower.”
“So you’re saying that I need to destroy some of my other constraints?”
“Absolutely not. There’s nothing wrong with incremental growth. Incremental changes are almost always easier to make than exponential, and they tend to come with fewer complications.”
“But also a lower ceiling, right?” I asked.
“Precisely, Kelvin.”
“I’m not fully following,” Christy said. “Can you give an example of when you might not want exponential growth?”
“Certainly, Christy. On the first day of class, you said you wanted to be a physical therapist. Let’s say you open up a solo practice. What would your constraints be?”
“Well, like Jarod, there’s only so many people I can see in a week, and only so much I can get away with charging.”
“Precisely. Darnell, can you think of one way that Christy could break those constraints to achieve exponential growth?”
“Well,” Darnell tapped his knee with his pen, “I guess she could hire more people.”
“Excellent. She could move into a bigger office and hire five associates, and suddenly she could be tending to far more clients. Kelvin, can you think of another?”
I chewed on the dry skin on my lip. “She could create an online course with exercises that people can do at home, and that way she could potentially help thousands of people worldwide.”
“Very creative, Kelvin. So now let’s return to Christy’s question of why you might not want to aim for exponential growth. Darnell, let’s say that Christy came to you for advice at a time when only 50% of her treatment hours were full, and she was charging near the low end of what physical therapists charge. Would you encourage her to hire associates?”
“No, first I’d tell her to fill up all of her available hours.”
“So once her hours were full, would you then tell her to hire associates?”
“No, I’d tell her to raise her rates.”
“When would you tell her to hire associates?”
“I guess,” Darnell said, “when she’s already charging the most people will pay, and she’s still got more people than she can handle.”
“Well done, Darnell. In this example, Christy had constraints on her business, but they were still fairly theoretical since she hadn’t bumped up against them. Hiring and managing staff can be a huge headache and expense and probably would have sunk her business rather than helping it at a time when she wasn’t ready for it.
“How about you, Kelvin, what would be the downside of your exponential growth strategy?”
“Based on what I saw with the swim team project, Christy doesn’t know much about making videos or marketing them. She’d either have to learn how or hire someone who does. That could be costly and distract her away from building her existing practice.”
“So how does this all relate to me?” Jarod asked.
Mr. Griffin stopped at Jarod’s desk. “It sounds to me like your constraints are already holding you back.”
“So how do I get beyond them?”
“I promised you a hint, not an answer.”
The next day, Jarod didn’t show up to school, but he called my phone within a minute of the final bell.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Working on exponential growth.” Jarod’s voice punched through my earpiece. “I bought three more plows today.”
“Where’d you get the money to do that?”
“Financed them, like Bill said.”
“That sounds risky.”
“If this storm is half as big as they’re predicting, I’ll have them half paid off in a week.”
“But you’ve only got one truck. What are you going to do, put a plow on all four sides?”
“I’ve only got one, but I have plenty of friends with trucks. Every single one of them was jealous when I told them what I’d made last time.”
“Couldn’t they just go out and get their own plows?”
“They could,” Jarod said, “but more to the point, they didn’t.”
“So you’re planning on hiring three guys with trucks?”
“Five. Three for the plows, and two more to carry snow blowers.”
“I thought snow blowing wasn’t worth it?”
“It’s not, for one guy.” Jarod must have been smiling ear-to-ear. “But if I hire a couple of kids with snow blowers to go in each truck, they could arrive after we’ve plowed the driveways and finish off the walks.”
“Where are you going to get work for all of these people?” I asked.
“That’s why I’m calling you. The storm’s not supposed to hit until tomorrow afternoon. Can we do another flyer, for pay this time? I can pass it out in the morning.”
“You sure you want to do that? That seems too tight a window for a flyer. I’ve already got your logo. In under an hour I could put up a quick website and then we could start ads across all the social media platforms.”
“You can create a website in an hour? Alright, I’m in. I’m putting my drivers on commission, so I’ll have them spread the word to their networks as well.”
“How do you plan to coordinate six trucks? You can’t just put your cell phone on the website. You need a proper dispatch or something.”
“That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Stop staring at the wall!” Christy screamed.
Amanda pounded her arm into the water. “I don’t want to ram into it.”
“Every time you turn to look, you slow yourself down.”
“Not as slow as I’ll go if my head smacks into the wall!”
Christy clenched her fists, but I fought back a laugh. As much as I wanted Amanda to improve, I sympathized with her fear of smacking into a wall that she wasn’t even allowed to look at. Of course, I had problems of my own. After almost a week solid of playing dispatch for Jarod during the winter storm that wouldn’t stop, the skies cleared at last, and I finally got to work on Christy’s scholarship video. To get this segment right, I needed to film Christy coaching Amanda through the turn. Neither Christy berating Amanda, nor Amanda’s sarcastic replies, would persuade a college coach to take a chance on Christy.
“Christy, do you think for five minutes you could pretend to offer helpful advice, and Amanda, could you pretend to listen thoughtfully, like she’s actually helping you?”
Amanda said, “You think the college coaches will play along and pretend to offer her a scholarship?”
“You’d better learn this turn fast, Amanda. In another four days, I’m going to get back in this pool and kick your ass.”
“Bring it, Bride.”
“Bride? Bride?” Christy turned on me, holding out her crutch like a weapon. “You told her my Bride of Frankenstein comment?”
I held the video camera out between us. “Careful, Christy. If you hit the camera all our footage will be gone, and your scholarship chances with it.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re bluffing. I bet you uploaded last week’s footage within an hour of filming.”
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. You feeling lucky?” I asked in my best Clint Eastwood voice, which admittedly wasn’t very good.
Christy grinned, for half a second. With me at least she could still joke around. But then Amanda laughed, a loud cackle of a laugh that must only exist in homeschoolers—school would have beat it out of her in a week. Like everything else Amanda did, this drew Christy’s ire.
Fortunately, Coach Sue chose this moment to walk over. “OK,” she said to Amanda, “show me what you’ve got.”
Amanda swam toward the wall, flipped over and pushed off.
“Much better,” Coach Sue said. “Good job, both of you.”
Coach Sue walked off, and Christy hobbled after her. Once out of earshot, I turned to Amanda, “Why’d you do it so much better for Coach Sue?”
“It’s cold in the pool. The steam coming out of Christy’s ears warms me up.”
Amanda’s social conflicts didn’t end with Christy. When she wasn’t in the pool, she’d usually pull those glasses of hers over her swim cap and read. The other girls on the team glanced her way and spoke in hushed tones. Was she oblivious of the fact that everyone made fun of her, or did she just not care?
With enough cutting and pasting, I finally got a decent video made, splicing together one of Christy’s instructions from the very beginning of practice and the flip turn that Amanda did for Coach Sue near the end.
Mr. Griffin, with his bizarre ability to sense what was going on, started on this subject the next day.
“So Christy, how’s it going with Amanda?”
“She’s driving me nuts.”
“Why?”
“She’s weird.”
“How’s her swimming coming along?”
“It’s getting there. It seems like she’s not getting anything in practice. But then the next day she’ll come in way better.”
“You think she’s practicing during the day?” Jarod asked.
“Maybe. Guess that’s a benefit of not being in school. But sometimes I think she holds herself back just to piss me off.”
I didn’t dare share what Amanda told me the day before, but Christy must have caught the grin on my face. “She’s especially obnoxious when Kelvin’s around. I think she’s got a crush on him.”
A crush on me? Since when was anyone ever interested in me? Fortunately, Mr. Griffin took the conversation in a different direction. “You never put Amanda onto your cards, did you?” he asked.
“How did you know?”
Mr. Griffin sighed. “You must understand that the cards work on both the conscious and subconscious level. You begrudgingly decided to work with Amanda, but we all know it went against the grain of what you wanted deep down. Is it any wonder you’re feeling friction? Use the cards to get yourself in alignment.”
Christy pulled out her swimming card. “There,” she said, “I just added training Amanda among the steps I’ll take to win the championship. Happy?”
“Why should it matter if I’m happy?” Mr. Griffin asked. “How do you feel?”
“I can’t wait to get back in that pool and pulverize her.”
Mr. Griffin laughed. “Well, as we’ve all learned by now, sometimes the notecards take time.”
“I’ve got a problem,” Jarod said, just after the bell rang at the beginning of class.
“What’s that, Jarod?” Mr. Griffin asked. “I thought things were going well?”
“They are. Too well. I’m no longer stretching myself.”
“Ah, very astute, Jarod,” Mr. Griffin said, raising an eyebrow. “Does anyone else see the problem here?”
Christy asked, “Is it like in lifting weights, where you need to keep pushing yourself at the edge of your abilities to grow stronger?”
“Precisely. Growth rarely happens within your comfort zone,” Mr. Griffin said. “Once you grow yourself, you need to grow your goals as well, or else you’ll find yourself stagnating again.”
“I never thought I’d ask a teacher for this,” Jarod said, “but I want more homework.”
“Homework?”
“Yeah. Before, when I thought I was going to college, I figured I’d have plenty of time to figure stuff out. Now that I’m going into business for myself, there are tons of things I need to learn.”
“I know little about the landscaping business. What are you hoping I can teach you?”
“I guess how to find the answers within myself. That’s mainly what you’ve done so far. Haven’t you got any more tricks up your sleeve?”
“Tricks? Very well. If you want tricks, I’ll give you tricks.”
