Seth Godin famously talks about “The Dip”: the difficult stretch you encounter after the initial excitement of starting something new wears off, but before you’ve achieved real success.
Every worthwhile endeavor — a career, a project, learning a skill, a relationship — involves a Dip. In the Dip, progress feels elusive and results non-existent. This is where most people give up.
According to Godin, winners are the ones who don’t quit in the Dip. If you can persevere through the Dip, you’ll get extraordinary results.
That’s not to say that “winners never quit.” In fact, Godin argues that winners know which pursuits aren’t worth their time, effort, and energy and quit those pursuits to devote more resources to pursuits that will pay off bigger.
The Dip is plotted on an X/Y axis as a linear process. But this isn’t accurate. Life, work, relationships, and skills do not function on a linear path of time and success. They are cyclical, like the seasons.
If you only see challenges as a “dip” to “push through,” you might push when you need to rest, inviting burnout, or — perhaps more fatefully — quit when you need to rest.
The Spirals of the Seasons
Growth happens through cycles of expansion, contraction, death, and renewal.
- *Spring*: New beginnings, excitement, energy, ideas in bloom.
- *Summer*: Consistent and persistent effort, engagement, visibility, momentum.
- *Autumn*: Harvesting results, reevaluating, releasing what’s no longer needed, pruning.
- *Winter*: Dormancy, rest, reflection, unseen growth, consolidating lessons.
Read: An Introduction to the Energy of the Seasons
The seasons play out in nature around us, as well as within us.
An extra nuance is that the seasons are fractals. In nature, there’s a “spring of spring,” a “summer of spring,” an “autumn of spring,” and a “winter of spring.”
In the overarching timeline of your life, you have a spring, summer, autumn, and winter. But within each phase of life you have all seasons.
Each area of your life, and each project within that area of life, also goes through the seasons in all their layers.
Reading the Seasons
Understanding the cycles can help us see when it’s time to double down and maintain efforts, when it’s time to pause to reap the harvest of our efforts, when it’s time to rest something, and when it’s time to begin something new.
If you have trouble “letting go” or “quitting,” reframing your actions as a wintering can make the process easier. It’s not “quitting for good” but allowing the natural pause in the process.
If you have trouble starting something new, you can look to your seasonal cycles: it may be an indicator that you’re still in a winter phase.
Success = Seasonal Wisdom
Success isn’t about linear persistence. It’s about seasonal wisdom — doing the right thing at the right time. Knowing when to rest, when to push, when to prune, and when to plant again.
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