I remember sitting up late one night in my twenties overwhelmed by the sheer number of doors I would never open. Not metaphorical doors--actual, physical doors to physical buildings and rooms. It had hit me earlier that day that the number of doors I would even encounter in my life is infinitesimal compared to the total number of doors, and the ones I would open of that tiny subset were orders of magnitude smaller still.
I suppose I could have responded to this by making some strange life rule where I always try the handle on every door, but I think I grew a lot more by deciding it doesn't matter, that opening all the doors, or even maximizing my chances to open doors, would be a waste of my life. So I guess they doubled as metaphorical doors after all.
I don't know how measurable it would be, but I would rather measure my personal growth by the peace I've managed to find with the realities I can't change and the choices I've made. For instance, I'm not infinite. I'm going to die. There will be things I dislike about the world that won't change during my lifetime. Stuff like that. That seems like a better measure to me of how much I'm growing.
My mom is a good example to me. The first time she got diagnosed with cancer (12 years ago), she had option option option. There was everything to try, but it was all fraught with the pressure of making the wrong choice, or messing something up, or not knowing.
This time, after she'd been cancer-free for 12 years and got diagnosed with a whole different cancer, it's been so different. She'll either beat it or she won't. Anything that's tried will either work or it won't. It will suck either a little or a lot, until it doesn't anymore, for one reason or another. She's subjectively freer now because she's not trying to get out of the "bad" options. They're just coming and she's just going through them.
She seems a lot more empowered this go-round.
You know that part of the Serenity Prayer, about "the wisdom to know the difference"? I feel more empowered when I don't try to judge that with a razor's margin. When I stop thinking, "Maybe, if I just try hard enough or in exactly the right way, this could be 'something I can change,'" and recognize how small my impact actually is on anything but my own life and the lives of the people very closest to me, the more empowered I feel.
Recognizing when each approach is useful, and being able to do it (even poorly) is a great skill.
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations
I’ve found many times in life that limitations and obsessing over quality lead to more growth than obsessing over productivity.
I remember asking a guy who worked at a high end place how he liked working there. He said, “It’s good…if you’re good”
It can’t be all option-maximizing and no mastery.
* If you always focus on growth, sometimes you focus less on maintaining what you already have. It tends to be the case that when you're really growing on some things, you're sometimes neglecting other things.
* I like to keep a small allocation of my time/energy to growth, but most of it on maintenance because I want to keep much of the good things I already have. Obviously this allocation varies by individual (based on your goals/desires/energy/time)
* Focusing on maximal optionality can be good, but of course an option is only useful when exercised. Collecting options is just a cost (premiums paid). At some point you need to truncate the options (let them expire/have doors close) and exercise/execute on a select few
> Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.
Like any good maxim, the original author is lost to time. But this [1] traces it to:
> It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Which is from William Bruce Cameron's 1963 text “Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking.”
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/26/everything-counts-e...
And while that can be true, I think it only applies once you do really have your life together. Most of us, growing up, had lots of areas where we really struggled, hurting both ourselves and others, and it WAS important for us to reflect on those areas and consciously try to improve. I think it's only indulgent when done well past the point of need.
If all of that is sorted, I can now turn to applying my maximizing attention to my inbox or my personal health score or my friend-influence index or my standing deadlift or whatever else.
From '4,000 weeks': "Not only should you settle; ideally you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or having a child. The irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude -- to carry on believing that it might be possible not to choose between mutually exclusive options -- is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they're usually much happier as a result."
From 'Zero to One': "When people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. ... A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it "well-roundedness," a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it."
For a very different take on the topic... I too was interested in the question of "measuring personal growth." So much so that I enrolled in graduate school and am now getting a Ph.D. researching personality development / change in "individual differences" over time. Another way to conceptualize / measure personal growth could be via decreases in one's level of Neuroticism over time.
Also, there's a well-studied effect where adolescents typically experience decreases in neuroticism / negative emotionality as they change and mature as they move into young adulthood.
> I disagree. As I grow older, I have more dreams. I now know many things that I didn’t know before, and I have access to more resources than I ever did. This allows me to do things that I used to think of as impossible.
I sympathize with the friend. A significant life-altering event such as chronic illness, death of a loved one, NDE, etc can definitely recalibrate one's perspective in life and the trajectory one wants to follow or what one defines as personal growth. Sometimes it does involve halving the number of paths (i.e. due to a physical disability). If the author has gone through such hurdles and still been able to remain steadfast optimistic, that is indeed inspiring--more power to them, but the reality for a lot of people out there can be much less rosy.
Those are also measurable axes.
My single-bit ADC: if things that used to be stretches for me are now easy, and things that used to be impossible are now stretches, I'm still growing.
(I pushed strength and reflexes earlier in life; those areas are now no longer an option but on the other hand I've learned how to steadily progress in disciplines where one may take years to work through plateaus)
What I mean by personal growth in-the-small is something like Atomic Habits. Iterating on your habits to increase your effectiveness in the day-to-day opens up time and energy that can then be spent on the larger goals.
I really like the post, and just want to point out that this + Atomic Habits would be a good pairing!
It is wisdom and self-mastery: the ability to know what is right and wrong, the control to continually transform yourself, bit by bit, something that makes everything around you better.
These things she talks about are fine, but in the best lived life, they merely follow from the first.
I have a really hard time relating to this (except if you frame problem as "something to be solved somehow"). I'm much more focused on solving the problems of: finding activities that are worth living for (programming, drawing, music, reading, writing, sports, nature) and friendships and intellectual exchange.
I find myself growing as I am able to focus my attention on these topics and feel that I am doing so in a sustainable way, and feel content (almost) every day.
These are likely tech friends I suppose? I would say non-tech people would drop the mildly.
This is leaking the productivity frenzy mindset through the cracks, but appreciate the attempts through the text to push back against it.
