Measuring Personal Growth

During table tennis practice last year, I caught myself counting imaginary scores. Not the actual rally. The implied one. This person broke it five times, I broke it three, therefore I’m losing. At practice. Against friends. No stakes whatsoever. I’d done it my whole life: hackathons, group projects, anything with a scoreboard real or invented. If I was in, I was in to win.

I don’t count imaginary scores anymore. Sometimes I lose a rally on purpose now, just to keep the game going, because the game is the point. Noticing that shift is what got me thinking about how you’d even measure something like personal growth in the first place. If I’d quietly gotten better at the one thing I’d been bad at my whole life, what else could you actually track? And who else thinks about this?

Some friends told me this whole exercise is mildly sociopathic. Why measure everything? Life is to be lived, not scored. They’re not wrong, they’re just asking the wrong person to stop. I’m a mathematician and an athlete at the core. I will always keep score. I will always want the win. I’m going to measure, whether I decide to or not. So the question was never whether to measure. It was what to measure. Net worth and follower counts aren’t what I live for. This post is me trying to point that instinct at the right numbers. It’s me trying to mend me.

Rate of change

I have this theory that life has a circadian rhythm. Every 3-6 years, you become a different person. You work on different problems. Your lifestyle changes. The people you hang out with are different. If you haven’t caught up with a friend in 5 years, you might no longer have anything in common. It’s not a coincidence that schools are structured into chunks of 3-6 years.

I can see it in my own life, chapter by chapter. Table tennis. Competitive maths. Engineering school. Each one a different person, each one barely recognizing the last. And then, for almost two years, I was nobody in particular. Between versions, with no next one in sight. I’d come out of a structure that told me who I was every morning, and for the first time nobody was handing me one. I didn’t handle it well. It was only recently that I felt like I had a handle on life again.

I wonder if I could treat myself like an investment, and measure my growth by how long it’d take me to become a new person.

Finance has a name for this. The rule of 72. Divide 72 by your annual return and you get the years it takes to double. 8% a year, and your money doubles every nine. What I want to know is the return on me. How long until the version I’m living as now is unrecognizable to the one who started?

Becoming a new person isn’t always a good thing, and probably not the goal for everyone. But for me, it is. I want to see things from a new perspective. I want to be exposed to new challenges.

Becoming a new person sounds clean. It isn’t. It feels like outgrowing a room you used to love, walking back in years later, and finding the ceiling too low to stand up straight in. You can’t un-grow. Some of my oldest friends are rooms I can’t stand in anymore. We still talk, I still love them, but I catch myself performing the old version of me so the conversation has somewhere to land, and we both feel the draft coming through the gap. The growth and the loss are the same event. I haven’t figured out how to want one without getting the other.

Time to solve problems

Mayank, an old friend doing his post-doc at Cambridge, frames it like this. Most people walk into three big problems after college, and spend roughly a decade on each. First, figuring out what you want to do with your life. Then marriage, a house, kids. Then savings, and the slow climb toward retirement. He calls them life projects. His goal is to close his faster, so he can get to more interesting ones. I realized I’d been quietly running the same race without ever naming it.

This made me think that perhaps I can measure my growth by looking at what big problems I’ve solved. What big problems was I worried about 5 years ago that I no longer worry about now? What big problems am I worried about now that I don’t want to worry about in 5 years?

What counts as a big problem depends on the person. For me, it’s career, finance, family, and health.

Five years ago the college kid in me panicked about money constantly. Every UPI notification was a small heart attack. That went quiet the day there was finally a real safety net behind me, and I didn’t notice the silence until months later. I used to want a place that was actually mine, in a big city, actually safe. That’s sorted now. My parents’ health used to send me into a spin with every little niggle. The niggles still come. I’ve just gotten better at carrying them without letting them flatten the whole week.

Some things quietly stopped registering as threats at all. Performance reviews used to cost me three days of low-grade dread each. Now they don’t cost me much. I didn’t fix that on purpose. I looked up one day and the fear had moved out without telling me.

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The big one is still open: what I actually want to do long-term, and where. My own company? A move to the US or Europe? That’s the weight I’d like to not be carrying five years from now. Writing that sentence down, in public, is the most honest thing in this post, because now I can’t pretend I haven’t noticed it.

Number of future options

A while back I read a theory on Twitter that every few years, half of your dreams die. People give up on their dreams because they realize they can no longer achieve them.

I disagree. As I grow older, I have more dreams. I now know many things that I didn’t know before, and I have access to more resources than I ever did. This allows me to do things that I used to think of as impossible. And the dreams keep multiplying instead of dying off. I keep a running list of a hundred things I want to do, and the giveaway is that I’ve crossed things off it and then deleted them anyway, swapping a goal I’d already hit for a bigger one. I can’t sit still, even with a win in hand.

During a reinforcement learning course in college, I learned there’s a name for how I’d already been living. Empowerment maximization. When an agent faces uncertainty, it picks the move that keeps the most doors open. Faced with a wall of switches, it pulls the one that unlocks the most others.

I didn’t need the jargon. I’d been doing it for years without a word for it. In the face of uncertainty, I lean towards the decision that gives me the most future options. I’d choose a job that pays less if it buys me more optionality: open source, papers, transferable skills over niche ones. I’d rather earn less now and keep the doors open behind me.

Perhaps I can measure my growth by how many new options I have gained/lost. What options are available to me today that were not available to me 5 years ago? What options were available to me 5 years ago that aren’t available to me now? More importantly, what options that are not available to me today do I want 5 years from now?

I came across this image from Wait But Why. As time goes by, many doors close to us, but many new ones open up. That tweet was talking about the red lines on the left. I keep my eyes on the green lines on the right.

Conclusion

I don’t know if these three metrics are right. I don’t think right is the point. They’re the ones I can’t stop watching.

I still play table tennis on office breaks and weekends. I still feel the old reflex twitch when someone pulls ahead, the imaginary scoreboard lighting up. But more often now I let the rally run long. I feed an easy one back, try a stupid loop just to see if it lands, lose the point on purpose, because a rally that ends early isn’t worth winning. That’s the one metric I trust most. Not the rate, not the problems, not the options. Just this: I can finally lose on purpose. A younger me would have called that losing. He’d have been wrong.

Maybe one day I’ll get tired of exploring and want to stay still. I used to think staying still was the failure. Now I think wanting to stay still might be the biggest change of all. When that day comes, that’ll be growth too.