The Paradox of Personal Growth
The paradox of personal growth is that the mental models and personal biases that serve well at an early level hold you back at the next. Re-inventing one's personality repeatedly over time seems non-negotiable.
Become who you need to be to do what you want to do. Repeat.
The test for progress:
1. Does present you more consistently make what you want to happen, happen, than past you could?
2. Would past you (say ~5 yrs ago) violently disagree with present you on philosophical issues?
3. Are those differences the basis of your improved results?
Often, personal growth stalls because you don't know what you want to make happen.
You started out knowing.
You made it happen.
You levelled up otw.
But now after levelling up, everything changes and you no longer know what you want. (or worse, you still want the same thing)
Rebuilding volition and agency after levelling up is underestimated as a key problem.
Engineers who becomes a tech leads must rebuild their desires to suit, or they will fail because they’re chasing old ones.
Ditto for founders who scale their business past a milestone.
Folks who have levelled up and are now feeling lost often try to compensate by "trying harder".
As a famous fictional guru once said: "Good. Adaptation, improvisation. But your weakness is not your technique." :)
It’s in understanding that the rules of the game have changed.
When you levelled up, you most likely did so by making something unlikely happen.
To achieve that unlikely outcome, you studied and practiced until you truly understood the rules. More importantly, which could be bent, and which broken. #MatrixQuote
When the rules change, you have to start over - a hard thing to accept, especially if your level up was rooted in skills learned in childhood.
An advisor once told me "All the rules change at each order of magnitude of the business." IMO that's true outside of business as well.
A key early step toward operating in a new environment governed by a different ruleset is trying to understand what old goals are no longer meaningful, and which new ones are now in scope.
Happens all the time. Engineer to Manager. Pre IPO CEO to post IPO CEO.
As @smdcmc pointed out, you can discover that you don’t enjoy pursuing any of the new goals that open up after you level up — a situation I’ve found myself in several times over the course of my life and career.
In growing startups, the Reverse Spiderman Rule — with great responsibility comes great power — frequently traps people in this situation.
