How do you measure growth?

This is the most important growth hack I learned this year.

This morning, while working on a couple of things, I realized something that I’ve managed to miss all these months. Something that has been at the tip of my mind but I’ve been unable to realize and instead focused on berating myself all these while for nothing.

I have decided that this is the most important hack for growth I’ve learned this entire year and I want to share it with you in hopes that it will help put things in perspective.

I’m very big on personal improvement. Some would say “obsessed”. Every day, I try to do something new to improve on the knowledge I had the previous day.

I spend long hours daily reading articles and threads on Medium, Reddit, Quora, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and Twitter. And I spend time watching videos on different topics on YouTube, and listening to new podcasts on Google Podcasts.

Over time, I have become so obsessed with swallowing information that I’ve never realized why. The whole pressure to learn more, to know something new and all that has been based on the premise that if I didn’t learn something new daily, I was not growing.

There is some truth in that. But, it’s not all there is about growth.

Actual growth is better measured in action. Doing is the ultimate measure of growth. Of course you can learn a lot of things from reading articles, watching videos, and listening to podcasts. But you’ll never fully understand the extent to your understanding until you start implementing and experimenting with the ideas you’ve accumulated through learning.

As an aspiring writer, you can never fully measure the growth difference in your journey by simply reading articles and books, or taking courses on writing. While these will help you form a basic understanding of what to and what not to do when writing, they are not the ultimate measure of your personal improvement as a writer.

The ultimate measure is from comparing something you wrote weeks ago with something you’ve just finished writing and taking note of the differences and how much growth is visible in either. The measure of growth is in measuring relevant feedback on both something you wrote weeks ago and something you just wrote.

As a budding entrepreneur trying to build a business from the ground up, growth is measured in more than just how many Instagram followers you have, and how many likes you posts get. Conversions to sales are important as well, revenue is important as well, and customer satisfaction is important as well. Effectively measuring all these can help you better understand and measure the growth of your business.

The ultimate growth hack is not to know, it is to do. But knowledge is important too, so do well to learn as much as you can about your field.

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