I lurk around Chip Huyen's MLOps Discord and in a recent blog post, Chip shared her views on measuring personal growth. I was tempted to join her live meetup and talk about it but I thought a blog post would be a better way to articulate my ideas.
Before I delve(😜) into the blogpost, I asked my current favorite LLM what is the definition of "personal growth" and it spit out the following:
Personal growth is the process of developing and improving oneself mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or physically. It involves expanding self-awareness, learning new skills, overcoming challenges, and striving to become a better version of oneself. - A 20B parameter(?) LLM
It sounds pretty reasonable. Why do we want to experience personal growth? I think it's because we have goals, dreams, and hopes that our current self can't achieve. We grow so that our intentions become reality.
For people who enjoy numbers, it's highly tempting to quantify this process with numbers, optimize it and then draw some pretty graphs. However, I don't think having explicit metrics is always a good thing because some things in life are too complex to measure - relationships, happiness, and health. This is why when read Chip's post, some things didn't click with me so I decided to write this post. Before I continue, I want to clarify that this is not a takedown of her post but simply my musings on the topic. I don't want this to come out as a personal attack.
I find intruguing the idea that you become a new person every 3-6 years. I can look back to my school years (K-12 + grad school) and see how I changed throughout those times. New homes, new schools, new hobbies, new friends, a sense of physical(and maybe mental growth). After some time though, a sizable part of my mind has been occupied with maintaining the relationships that I have. People might change visually or they might change parts of their personality but a core part of them remains the same and I want to keep a connection with that core of my friends. I have friendships that I don't have the time or mental space for but whenever I get the chance and meet up with that friend, it feels like we never stopped talking over those many years.
The point I'm trying to make is we're in a constant state of reinvention and we make the conscious and unconscious decision to change. Like ships of Theseus we replace parts that need changing. Are we the same person or a completely different one?
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure - Charles Goodhart
Growth includes putting yourself through challenges scheduled and unscheduled challenges, reflecting on how you did in those challenges and taking steps towards changing yourself based on those reflections. If you use the time it takes to become a new person as a measure you will focus on changing instead of growing.
Chip quotes a friend who considers career, family and finance to be the three big problems that people have and that it takes about a decade to solve each. Chip's idea is to look at her own problems and measure growth by how many big problems were a problem before and not a problem now. As a person going through immigration issues in the US, I completely understand the desire to try to eliminate those as fast as possible. For other problems though, I would advise caution before plowing through them because I see it as a journey vs destination type of thing. Sometimes it's not about the destination but about the friends we make along the way.
To conclude this rambling post here are my takeaways: