The Wisdom of the Tadpole: Navigating change, wonder, and growth
“Today, I am a frog. But for most of my life, I’ve been a tadpole.”
So began my recent post about the launch of my new Zamchick Group website (https://lnkd.in/eWaNb7MG) Given my Blockbuster announcement regarding our consulting services and workshops, I’m inviting you to step back with me on the evolutionary ladder and read some reflections over the next few weeks on why I’m so taken by these little beasts and why it may matter to you.
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I was just a wide-eyed, curious four-year-old when I stumbled upon a small pond in Hawaii. It was miraculously beyond the command and control of my older siblings.
Armed with a simple white styrofoam cup, I dipped it into the vibrant waters and discovered a world teeming with creatures of all shapes, sizes, and stages of development. It was a secret world that fit into the palm of my hand. I was completely captivated, and spent what felt like hours observing and learning about every squiggly nuance of their being.
One might think that a single moment alone couldn’t shape an entire life’s trajectory. But this was no ordinary moment. It was a moment of wonder that would forever influence what captivates me in the world.
Imprinted like a newly hatched tadpole, I found myself looking for other ponds. I found them in watching ants build anthills, in catching bees and grasshoppers, and in a life-long love of biology. And ultimately, the very act of sitting beside ponds of all kinds, became my MO as an innovation consultant. The scientific, aesthetic, and humorous dramas of my tadpole pond experience — became guiding forces in my life.
This is just a tease of the story that is to come. I’ll just note for now that my primordial tadpole pond has had many guises over time. I saw it in the care and feeding of cockroaches in a high school parasitology experiment. It was in a constantly animated event display, a fishbowl of words, we placed on monitors throughout the World Trade Center and Financial Center in NYC. It’s in the salient details I try to capture when I listen to talks by experts in AI, media, and ethics. And it’s in the way objects magically appear when called by language in our WordsEye (www.wordseyeworld.com) application.
But if life was ‘all wonder all the time’ we’d probably not eat (not even bits of floating plant matter). So uncertainty was about to rear its ugly head.
Next: Hit by a brick.
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