Love Your Small Growth – Three Importances of Small Growth

Many of us have goals that we're working towards. Each of our journeys is a long process, whether getting fit, learning a new skill, or pursuing a career change. Sometimes it's so long that we can't believe we will reach our destination someday. Also, our growth is often slow and hard to see.

So, awareness of our small growth is essential to achieve our goals. There are three reasons why we need a sense of small growth:

It clarifies what to do next
It helps us reach our destinations faster
It keeps us motivated

We will see these three factors one by one in this post. But before that, let's start with what small growth is.

Photo by Christine on Unsplash

What is small growth?

In this post, we will regard the following three as small growth:

Gaining new knowledge that you didn't know before
Realizing that we can now do what we couldn't do before
Finding what we can't yet do

Gaining new knowledge that you didn't know before

The road to your goal is the process of learning. When you learn something, you need input first. For example, if you want to improve your communication skill, you may read a book about communication skills. If you learn from the book that attentive listening is one of the essential factors, then it's a small growth.

Realizing that we can now do what we couldn't do before

We often fixate on our goals as a whole. However, we should remember that we can only achieve them through the accumulation of solving small daily tasks. Suppose you wanted to be able to smile friendly. After several weeks of practicing smiling every morning, a colleague told you, "I feel like your smile is getting more natural than before." Then that's a small growth.

Finding what we can't yet do

We often find what we can't yet do during our learning. It may sound contradictory, but it's also a small growth. As the Five Stages of Learning concept implies, knowing what we don't know is an essential learning step. We can't improve what we haven't found as a problem.

Why should we be aware of small growth?

Small growth clarifies what to do next.

Have you ever felt you have a dream but don't know how to realize it? If you have, It's natural. As Hideto Tomabechi, a Japanese cognitive scientist, said in his book, if you know how to realize it, your dream is not a dream but a part of your reality you haven't yet seen. It isn't easy to achieve our goals because we don't know how.

It's like wandering in a vast maze whose size you don't know, looking for an exit that is unsure it exists. Moreover, there's no window, door, or room; every wall, floor, and ceiling is painted solid white. You don't know where you are as every place is bleak and indistinguishable. Can you continue seeking a way out? If you have nothing, maybe many of you will give up and can't help pushing an emergency escape button if you have one.

However, if you have a lot of coins, things will be different. You can use the following strategy using coins as markers:

Can you find a path with no coin placed?
- Yes: step into the path and put a coin face up.
- No: step back to a place with a coin face up (there should be exactly one place that meets the condition), then flip it.
Repeat the above steps until you find an exit.

(If you're interested in the detail, you can search for Depth First Search. Also, this video may be helpful.)

In the above strategy, you will experience the following three states:

Discover a path you've never visited.
Realize you've already traversed all the paths before you.
Realize some paths before you remain untraversed.

Whichever state you are in, you can tell what to do next. If you find a new path, what to do next is try to traverse it. If you complete the traverse, what to do next is find another path. If you haven't yet completed the traverse, what to do next is keep continuing it.

And as you may have already noticed, the three states above correspond metaphorically to the three small growth types I have described:

The discovery of a new path corresponds to gaining new knowledge.
Completion of a traverse corresponds to skill acquisition.
Incompletion of a traverse corresponds to the discovery of a skill shortage.

Small growth is a vital marker in our journeys to our goals. Though our actual processes of achieving our dreams are more complex, awareness of small growth helps us understand what to do next.

Small growth helps us reach our destinations faster.

Have you ever had the experience of working hard every day to achieve your goal, only to find yourself taking a detour? Since our destinations are so far away, we're subject to diverging from the shortest route. So how can we achieve our goals as straightforward as possible?

To find an answer, let's think about a voyage. Imagine you're on the shore, about to sail to a beautiful island with a boat. You know where you are and where you go on a map. The island is so far away that it's not visible from where you are now. You have a GPS so that you can see your location anytime. In this case, how will you try to reach the island?

You'll always check your location to stay within the course, won't you? The more frequently you check where you are, the faster you notice you're about to go off the route. The quicker you find divergences from the course, the shorter your detours get. In other words, you'll get to the goal faster with frequent location checks. If you don't check where you are so often, you may take many detours before reaching your goal. Or worse, you may not get there.

The same thing goes for the process of achieving goals. Small growth is GPS. By checking your status frequently, you can achieve your goal faster. That's the reason for the importance of finding your small growth with frequent reflections on the results of your actions.

Small growth keeps us motivated.

How long will it take to achieve your goal? One month, one year, or one decade? The bigger your goal is, the longer it will likely take. What is more, you can't tell when your dream comes true. It's like running a marathon where you don't know the total length of the course. Can you keep running if you don't know how long you've run from the start?

However, things will be different if you find milestones on the roadside. Milestones will tell you how long you've run since you started the marathon. You may get confident if you can tell how far you've come from the start. Confidence will fuel your motivation to run. And yes, small growth is a milestone in achieving your goal.

Also, the third type of small growth, regarding finding what you can't yet do, has another meaning. You can think of realizing your lack of ability as a more positive one. It is meaningful as it isn't easy to be positive.

In your learning process, you realize many things you can't do. It's not fun to discover your immaturity. Your motivation to learn will wane if your every realization of your immaturity gets you depressed. However, if you think of finding what you can't yet do as a small growth, you won't be depressed unnecessarily. You can prevent your motivation from being eroded.

Don’t Worry If You Realize You Don’t Know Anything — Dunning-Kruger Effect and Five Stages of Learning

What can we do to feel small growth?

We now understand the importance of being aware of small, so what can we do? The input-output-feedback combination is one of the options because:

We need input to gain new knowledge.
Output and consequent feedback tell us what we've obtained and what we need to improve.
Output itself is a visible form of small growth.

Only Input Isn't Enough, We Need Output and Feedback

In this post, we've seen the importance of small growth:

It clarifies what to do next
It helps us reach our destinations faster
It keeps us motivated

Remembering these, let's continue the goal-achieving process. We can do it!

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