Many people cite “growth” as a major reason to take a job or work on a new project—but what exactly is growth? And if you take the job or complete the project, how do you know you’ve grown? Here’s my take on the matter, how I currently view my growth, and how I direct more energy toward growing myself and others.

On Growth

Personal growth, or self-development, is about learning new skills, improving existing ones, and exposing yourself to new situations and opportunities to gain the necessary experience for those skills. And skills don’t always refer to “technical” abilities; they can also include interpersonal skills such as expectation management, negotiation, trust-building, and more. This ties in with the introduction—it seems quite easy to define growth in terms of the skills we want to develop!

The tricky part is knowing did we actually grow? Given the new job or project, how do you determine if you truly learned or improved in a certain skill set? The truth is, it’s very hard to know for sure. Typically, setting a clear outcome can help. Maybe it’s “completing this project on time and within budget” or “getting this promotion”—achieving those results might indicate growth! Or, you might have just gotten lucky. You may have been in the right situation at the right time with the right group of people around you, and everything worked out.

That said, this doesn’t mean growth didn’t occur—you may have learned and improved in several ways through that experience. The point is, it’s difficult to know for certain. Well then, if not successful outcomes, what else could you use? Maybe comparing yourself to your peers? This is a slippery slope that can be more detrimental than helpful.

Comparisons

Comparing your performance with others, such as your peers, isn’t inherently bad. However, it’s crucial not to tie your self-worth to the performance of your peers! Your personal growth is just that—personal. It’s about your story, your history, and your experiences, all of which shape who you are today. You can’t possibly have the full context of any other individual (unless you can read minds or have a handy Point of View Gun), which makes the comparison (mostly) meaningless.

Your personal growth is just that-personal. It’s about your story, your history, and your experiences, all of which shape who you are today.

Instead, I suggest tying your sense of growth to a different comparison—comparison to yourself. For an athlete, it might be beating their personal best in a 100m sprint instead of winning the race. For a software engineer, it could be knowing how to complete a task without having to figure it out again—the growth is in the ingrained knowledge. Set yourself as the benchmark and continuously strive to improve against yourself. This isn’t always easy, but it’s a much fairer comparison to make.

Set yourself as the benchmark and continuously strive to improve against yourself.

That being said, healthy competition is good! Competition should drive us to improve ourselves, and surrounding ourselves with those at our level or better is one of the best ways to grow, as we can learn from each other. Just be careful not to be disheartened if you “lose”—if you’ve improved from your “previous best,” you’re certainly still growing.

Control, or the Illusion of It

Okay, so if you’re comparing yourself to your past self, that still doesn’t necessarily help with what you should be comparing. Completing projects on time or landing a new job—while great aspirations that certainly come with growth—don’t always help in identifying exactly what you grew in. In fact, success could be purely the result of luck—did others on the project carry it to success while you actually detracted from it? Were you simply the best candidate who interviewed for the job, rather than truly excelling?

That’s why I prefer a different approach—one that’s less tied to the outcome and more tied to my input. This is probably best explained with some examples!

Example 1 - “I want to land this new job”

Instead of measuring growth by the outcome of getting the job, consider the skills and effort involved.

Effort & skills might include

• The number of job applications you complete in a certain time period
• How concisely can you describe the skills in your CV
• Were there any questions that threw you off in an interview? Prepare for them for next time!

Example 2 - “I want to complete this project on time and in budget”

Instead of focusing on the success of the project, again, consider the skills and effort you put in.

Effort & skills could be

• The tasks assigned to me were completed on time
• Identifying risks and implementing mitigation plans for them

These are a bit easier to measure, and you can grow in them regardless of the overall outcome you are striving for. This extends to roles where your primary contribution is actually not to be doing but rather managing or leading, while you may need to be a bit more intentional on what skills you are trying to grow.

Example 3 - “My team needs to complete this project on time and in budget”

The illusion of control in this situation is believing you can control other individuals to do exactly what you need - this is simply not possible.

Focus on what you can control and what input you can give, such as

• Providing a clear vision, mission, and purpose for the team
• Remove obstacles impeding progress
• Provide clear plans and processes

Your team may still fail, but if you’ve done everything you could, your growth comes from understanding what went wrong despite your efforts.

Example 4 - Launching a new product?

It can be tempting to tie your success to revenue. Unless you’re holding your customers at gunpoint, you can’t force people to pay for your product! Instead, focus on what is within your control:

• this marketing campaign attracted this many new sales, or
• these features generated new leads

Your product may still ultimately fail to hit revenue targets, but the skills you develop (or weaknesses you identify) will help you next time.

But I do want the outcome!

That’s not to say you shouldn’t work toward the success of a project or landing a job—ultimately, that’s what you want. However, failing to achieve those goals won’t help you understand why unless you track the skills involved that you can actually improve. Success isn’t a destination; it’s a journey—it’s about doing what you set out to do and improving yourself along the way. You can act successfully now, and the results may come later, but your skills will remain with you forever.