Growth Happens Underground Before It Happens in Public

TLDR

This piece from Growth by Visuals uses the simple metaphor of planting flower bulbs with kids to explore how real growth — personal, professional, creative — happens silently and invisibly long before any results show. The core message: the work you do when nobody is watching is the work that matters most.

The Bulb Metaphor: Why Invisible Work Is the Real Work

There is something deeply honest about planting three hundred flower bulbs with your kids and then waiting. No dashboard. No analytics. No weekly progress report. Just dirt, cold, and trust that something is happening beneath the surface.

Hidde from Growth by Visuals opens with a scene that any parent would recognize — his twin boys sprinting in from the garden, beside themselves with excitement because a few centimeters of green have finally pushed through the soil. And here is what I find genuinely compelling about this: it is his thirty-eighth spring. He has seen this before, many times. But watching his children experience it with fresh eyes forced him to actually stop and pay attention to what was happening.

The metaphor he draws is straightforward but worth sitting with. Bulbs do their most critical work in total darkness. They build root systems in the cold, with zero external validation. No one applauds a bulb for growing roots in January. The feedback loop is nonexistent. And yet, without that invisible root-building phase, there is no flower in spring. Period.

This maps cleanly onto how most meaningful professional and creative work actually happens. We live in an era that is obsessed with visible output — shipping, posting, launching, announcing. But the people who build things that actually last tend to spend long stretches doing work that nobody sees or celebrates. Learning a new skill. Restructuring how they think about a problem. Building infrastructure. Writing drafts that never get published. That quiet phase is not a failure to produce. It is the production.

The visual he references — "you grow internally before you grow externally" — is not revolutionary advice. But the reason it resonates is that most of us intellectually agree with it while behaviorally ignoring it completely. We get anxious when we are not producing visible output. We interpret quiet periods as stagnation rather than foundation-building. And that anxiety often causes us to surface too early, before the roots are deep enough to sustain what comes next.

It's flower-time

Key Takeaways

• Invisible progress is still progress. The most important phases of growth often produce zero visible output. That does not mean nothing is happening.
• Fresh eyes reveal what familiarity hides. Sometimes it takes watching someone else experience something for the first time to remind you of what you have stopped noticing.
• Patience is not passive. There is a meaningful difference between waiting because you are stuck and waiting because you are building something that is not ready to surface yet.
• The feedback gap is real and uncomfortable. Modern culture rewards visible output constantly. Doing deep work with no external validation requires genuine discipline and self-trust.
• Root depth determines flower height. The strength of what you eventually show the world is directly proportional to the work you did when nobody was watching.