Rivers or Roads

When you think of a career in ecosystem building and entrepreneur support, for most it’s a pathway of doing more with less. 

This is a field centered around leveraging networks to support founders, curate deal flow for investors, and drive economic growth that strengthens communities, creates jobs, and increases real estate value. Despite the value created, as practitioners, those in our field struggle for resources and are often operating on a shoestring budget. 

This creates a tendency to make decisions on how to manage scarcity.

Career growth can feel limiting and we look at each business approach as a fork in the road. A place where we must choose to give up one thing so that we may focus our limited resources and attention on another.

Scarcity teaches us to think either/or, even when our work is inherently centered on saying “yes, and.”

To understand how deeply this mindset is embedded, it helps to look at the story that shaped it.

Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken is about a single traveler, standing alone, forced to choose one path over another.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

This is a deliberate and solitary journey.

That IS NOT ecosystem building!!!

A better analogy is a river. A river is more than a single path, it is a system of tributaries. Each program, each partnership, each source of capital, each dataset feeds into something larger. The strength of the river is not determined by choosing the right path, but by how many paths connect with it.

Every effort we frame as a competing priority fragments the system. Every effort we integrate increases the flow and power of what the river can move.

Rivers are life giving. They shape the land and bring nutrients. They were our first way of establishing the commerce routes that lead to the transition from tribes to civilizations.

So we can continue to walk the noble path, deliberately choosing each fork, managing scarcity one decision at a time.

Or we can build something that flows.

Because trying to create system-level change can feel like trying to boil the ocean.

But rivers do not boil oceans.

They fill them.

#BeTheNode