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We often think of self-improvement as a deliberate process. But it’s far broader than that. You can grow without any attempts at new habits or goals.
When we better recognize the myriad of ways we’ve grown into who we are today, it can help us see and grasp future opportunities.
We Don’t Have to Optimize to Evolve
Let’s unpack common, important mechanisms of personal growth that often go unnoticed. Try to identify your own example of each one. Treat this as a reflection exercise, not a to-do list.
1. What We Want to Experience Beats Out What We Want to Avoid
Chloe finishes graduate school and desperately wants to travel, but she can’t afford hotels. She never in her wildest dreams imagined she’d be comfortable staying in shared dorms in a hostel, but it’s the only way she can visit the European cities she’s hankering to experience. So she sucks it up and tries it. She surprises herself by actually enjoying having fellow travellers to chat to.
When we want to do something more than we want to avoid something else, we evolve.
2. A Hardship or Stressor Leads to a New Skill
A room of your house floods, and your insurance deductible is high, so you decide to fix it yourself. You didn’t have any interest in DIY before, but you’re forced by the circumstances. It cuts through your tendency to overthink and second-guess. The repair presents a constrained problem. You need to get a project done safely, quickly, cheaply, so you do.
Things we do in a pinch that might only be intended to be temporary or the minimum often surprise us and lead to growth.
3. Social Relationships Lead You into Unexplored Territory
Jan’s daughter is 24 and moved out a few years ago. Jan misses her. When her daughter invites her to go on a multi-day hike with friends, she accepts even though it’s not exactly her cup of tea. The experience is a mixed bag but with some positive surprises.
4. People We Follow Evolve and Nudge Us Along with Them
By this point in the social media era, many of us have followed particular content creators for years. We see them growing and exploring different topics, beyond whatever original reason we started following them. They prod us along to try similar things.
Why does this happen? People we actually know may be more private and give us less insight into their new interests and evolutions, whereas content creators and other public figures often put more out there. More of their journey is documented and on show. They might also be a bit different from our own social group. For example, you live in a small city, but a content creator you follow who lives in a big city inspires you to go there and do something they did.
5. Technology or Other Changes Create New, Needed Scaffolding
Rebecca abandoned a project when she became too overwhelmed to finish it.
In the last few months, she’s started using AI more for troubleshooting. She began to realize it might be able to help her get past the parts of her project she’d gotten stuck with. It did, and she was able to finish it.
Gradually she’s started to fix various things around her home she’d been ignoring, with AI help. It doesn’t always work out, but sometimes it does.
Responsive Growth Isn’t a Lesser Form
Personal development can sometimes feel heavy. Hustle culture can seem to always be telling us we’re not optimizing ourselves enough. We’re not aggressively going after everything we want as much as we should be. We’re not “all in” or living the biggest life we could.
We don’t have to buy into this narrative. We can allow ourselves to be pulled along. We can grow opportunistically. We can follow our nose. We can try things without being sure we’ll like them, or that they’re a good idea. We can allow ourselves to be influenced by others.
The more we understand these mechanisms, the more we can appreciate how we’ve evolved into who we are today and can capitalize on opportunities that pique our interest.
This post isn’t meant as an argument against intentional self-improvement or an argument that our identity and life trajectory just drift along with the breeze. The purpose is merely to point out that responsive growth isn’t a lesser form.
It’s easy to tire of messages that we should be doing more and setting bigger goals. We don’t need to make a choice between that and not evolving. We can let life do the work of presenting us with challenges and opportunities we feel drawn to respond to.
