Still fixing every phone himself

A young man in Minya started out repairing phones on a folding table outside a relative's shop. He was careful with money, because there was none. He bought used tools, worked late, did every job himself and turned nothing down.

Five years on, he has a real shop with a glass counter, a steady line of customers and an apprentice. And he still behaves as if he were at the folding table.

He will not buy the proper workbench and lamp, though his eyes ache by evening. He takes every screen repair himself and leaves the apprentice sweeping. He still says yes to jobs that cost him more in time than they pay. Every one of those habits was smart once. Now most of them are quietly expensive.

This is one of the hardest things about progress of any kind. The rules we built at an earlier stage do not announce that they have expired. Frugality that kept a small business alive starts to starve a bigger one. Caution that protected a beginner becomes the thing holding back someone who now knows the work.

None of this is anyone's fault. It is not a sign that the old way was wrong, or that the new situation is a loss. It is simply that the person, the shop and the circumstances have all moved, and the settings have not moved with them.

The useful habit is to check them now and then. What am I still doing because it was right three years ago? What am I avoiding because it used to be too risky, and is no longer?

Changing the answers is not giving up on who we were. It is what growing up looks like.