In 2023, my company handled a large volume of projects.
At first they were clustered close together, so the workload felt manageable. Then new projects started coming in from farther locations, and I found myself driving over an hour just to supervise sites. The days got longer and decisions I had to make multiplied. The stress I carried home became overwhelming.
One day I caught myself complaining about it and then immediately stopped.
I couldn't complain about the same blessing I had once prayed for.
When I sat with that honestly, I realized the projects were not the problem. The problem was that I’d not grown into the man the projects required. I lacked the systems, the structure, the team capacity. The opportunity had arrived, but I had not grown to meet it.
This is something I have watched happen to many people.
We pray for growth, influence, marriage, leadership, money, expansion and then when those things arrive, they expose us. Not because the opportunity was wrong, but because we had been preparing for the moment without preparing for the weight that comes with it.
There is a popular saying that people prepare more for weddings than they do for marriage. I think about that often. We spend so much energy admiring positions and pursuing opportunities that we forget to prepare for the responsibility attached to them. Then the weight begins to press, and we become overwhelmed, and we assume something has gone wrong.
Nothing has gone wrong. We are simply being shown who we actually are.
But I have also learned that responsibility itself can force growth out of a person and this is the part of the conversation that people often miss.
Years ago, my pastor appointed me to head the media team at church. The problem was that I knew almost nothing about the media department. I had no real qualification for the role. But because the responsibility was placed on me, I had to figure it out.
When the church needed graphics for programs and events, I started learning Canva just to solve an immediate problem. I wasn't thinking about my career. I was just trying not to fail the people depending on me. But that same skill later became useful in my architectural work, I had previously paid people to handle post-production and presentations. The responsibility I was given in church saved me money years later in a completely different context.
I didn't grow first and then take on the role. The role produced the growth.
Some of the skills we carry today were not planned. They were forced out of us by demands we didn't feel ready for. And this is why I don't completely agree with the idea that people should only accept what they are fully prepared for. If we wait until we feel ready, many of us will wait forever.
Sometimes the opportunity is the preparation. But there is a limit to this and it is an important one. There are responsibilities where the cost of incompetence is not a lesson. It is a life.
Driving, surgery, flying, structural engineering. Construction projects where a miscalculation does not produce a learning moment, it produces a collapsed building or dead client or workers. In these fields, "I am figuring it out" is not an honest posture. It is a dangerous one. Some responsibilities have room for growth through failure. Others require competence before access. Knowing which is which is not caution, it is wisdom.
After that intense season of projects passed, I knew I had to build differently. Not just improve my own skills, but build a team capable of handling what I personally could not. Because there is another gap that talent alone cannot close and that is leadership capacity.
You may be genuinely skilled and still be incapable of coordinating other capable people to execute something larger than yourself. I have experienced this. There are projects that cannot be done alone no matter how gifted you are. And if you don't grow in your ability to lead and trust and delegate, you will keep hitting the same ceiling and calling it bad luck.
This is what our boys mentorship program has been teaching me in practice. I work alongside men who already embody the qualities we want the boys to develop, not because I have nothing to offer, but because the work is bigger than what I can carry alone. Shared responsibility among capable people produces something more sustainable than anything one person can build by himself.
Growth requires both courage and preparation.
Courage to step into things that stretch you before you feel ready. Preparation or the honest pursuit of it, to make sure your gaps don't cost other people something they cannot recover.
Responsibility can force maturity out of you. But some responsibilities require maturity before they will let you in.
So always evaluate what kind of responsibility you are involved with and the cost of failure.
This will guide you to know whether to step forward or first go and grow.