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Measuring personal growth
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Measuring personal growth
#22Does maximizing options maximize empowerment? I've found I feel much more empowered in a situation where I've already deeply committed to some specific thing than when I have dozens of options but haven't chosen one. Intentionally closing the door on thousands of options is actually the only path I've found that's made it possible for me to grow at all. If I maximize options, I can just escape when faced with a growt…
I think it's not so much as having many options but more so of having a lot of backup plans for when things eventually go wrong. There's analysis paralysis after all. It would be better to say that empowerment is maximized when there is a definitively best choice and there are several good backup choices (complete with sensible rankings down the chain of backups, ideally definitive) if the original choice suddenly be…
Hmm. I actually still find I'm subjectively freer when I can peacefully face the reality in front of me, even when it's not something I would want.
My mom is a good example to me. The first time she got diagnosed with cancer (12 years ago), she had option option option. There was everything to try, but it was all fraught with the pressure of making the wrong choice, or messing something up, or not knowing.
This time, after she'd been cancer-free for 12 years and got diagnosed with a whole different cancer, it's been so different. She'll either beat it or she won't. Anything that's tried will either work or it won't. It will suck either a little or a lot, until it doesn't anymore, for one reason or another. She's subjectively freer now because she's not trying to get out of the "bad" options. They're just coming and she's just going through them.
She seems a lot more empowered this go-round.
You know that part of the Serenity Prayer, about "the wisdom to know the difference"? I feel more empowered when I don't try to judge that with a razor's margin. When I stop thinking, "Maybe, if I just try hard enough or in exactly the right way, this could be 'something I can change,'" and recognize how small my impact actually is on anything but my own life and the lives of the people very closest to me, the more empowered I feel.
Re: Measuring personal growth
#23This post reminds me of a quote:
> Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.
Like any good maxim, the original author is lost to time. But this [1] traces it to:
> It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Which is from William Bruce Cameron's 1963 text “Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking.”
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/26/everything-counts-e...
Re: Measuring personal growth
#24Can’t fight this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_ti...
Re: Measuring personal growth
#25Does maximizing options maximize empowerment? I've found I feel much more empowered in a situation where I've already deeply committed to some specific thing than when I have dozens of options but haven't chosen one. Intentionally closing the door on thousands of options is actually the only path I've found that's made it possible for me to grow at all. If I maximize options, I can just escape when faced with a growt…
Reminds me of the quote:
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations
I’ve found many times in life that limitations and obsessing over quality lead to more growth than obsessing over productivity.
I remember asking a guy who worked at a high end place how he liked working there. He said, “It’s good…if you’re good”
It can’t be all option-maximizing and no mastery.
Re: Measuring personal growth
#26Does maximizing options maximize empowerment? I've found I feel much more empowered in a situation where I've already deeply committed to some specific thing than when I have dozens of options but haven't chosen one. Intentionally closing the door on thousands of options is actually the only path I've found that's made it possible for me to grow at all. If I maximize options, I can just escape when faced with a growt…
You are confusing words. In the context of the OP, "having many options" doesn't mean indiscriminately hoarding everything. It's like making choices in chess that result in having more options for moving pieces. The "premature optimization is the root of all evil" saying is an even more lacking analogy, but it conveys a similar idea. In other words, the advice to increase your options applies even if you dedicate your entire life to just one thing.
Re: Measuring personal growth
#27The greatest kind of growth isn’t any of these three metrics she mentions.
It is wisdom and self-mastery: the ability to know what is right and wrong, the control to continually transform yourself, bit by bit, something that makes everything around you better.
These things she talks about are fine, but in the best lived life, they merely follow from the first.
Re: Measuring personal growth
#28Does maximizing options maximize empowerment? I've found I feel much more empowered in a situation where I've already deeply committed to some specific thing than when I have dozens of options but haven't chosen one. Intentionally closing the door on thousands of options is actually the only path I've found that's made it possible for me to grow at all. If I maximize options, I can just escape when faced with a growt…
I think it's not so much as having many options but more so of having a lot of backup plans for when things eventually go wrong. There's analysis paralysis after all. It would be better to say that empowerment is maximized when there is a definitively best choice and there are several good backup choices (complete with sensible rankings down the chain of backups, ideally definitive) if the original choice suddenly be…
You hit the nail on the head. Increasing optionality is a very powerful tool that not enough people utilize.
Re: Measuring personal growth
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's not so much as having many options but more so of having a lot of backup plans for when things eventually go wrong. There's analysis paralysis after all. It would be better to say that empowerment is maximized when there is a definitively best choice and there are several good backup choices (complete with sensible rankings down the chain of backups, ideally definitive) if the original choice suddenly be…
Knowing when to optimize for optionality and when to burn the boats is key. Some things in life improve markedly when you let go of optionality and instead lean in to the constraint: significant relationships, jobs, parenting. Everyone's disposition biases them toward one side or the other. Recognizing when each approach is useful, and being able to do it (even poorly) is a great skill.
Letting go of optionality is a good thing when you have a safety net to fall back on. If you don't have one, the next best thing is to have various escape hatches available.
Re: Measuring personal growth
#30> A friend I’ve met through my Discord, Denys, told me that his friend has this theory that every few years, half of your dreams die. People give up on their dreams because they realize that 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.
I sympathize with the friend. A significant life-altering event such as chronic illness, death of a loved one, NDE, etc can definitely recalibrate one's perspective in life and the trajectory one wants to follow or what one defines as personal growth. Sometimes it does involve halving the number of paths (i.e. due to a physical disability). If the author has gone through such hurdles and still been able to remain steadfast optimistic, that is indeed inspiring--more power to them, but the reality for a lot of people out there can be much less rosy.