Growth should be fun; it’s okay to LAF a little.

We Want to Grow

Progress Guild is all about making, well, progress. Progress in what? Well that depends on the person, but it often focuses on growth in some area of your life. You might be growing your understanding of a topic, improving a skill, or developing an idea.

Growth is an exciting thing. It feels good to make progress and get closer to your goals.

Wanting growth, and not experiencing it, can also be incredibly frustrating.

This post is my take on growth: the different steps and why they’re important. In the following weeks, I’ll break down each step in more detail. In those posts I’ll explain how to succeed at the step, why we get stuck, and how to move forward.

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The Cycle of Growth

Growth has three equally important steps: Learn, Act, Feedback or LAF (more on this later, but I’m proud of this acronym). Effective growth moves from one step to the next and then starts all over again. The cycle of growth only ends when you decide it does.

Let’s briefly break down the steps.

1. Learn – The acquisition of new knowledge. This could come from books, videos, talking with others, or taking classes. There’s knowledge everywhere.
2. Act – Expressing knowledge in the real world (work). This could be building a bird house, writing a blog post, or painting a picture. You take what’s in your grey matter and manifest it in a way that others can view the result.
3. Feedback – Receiving the interpretations of your work from others. These perspectives are then compared to your original intent of the work, and you can decide next steps to improve your outcome.

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Learn

We don’t know what we don’t know. Maybe you’ve heard this confusing line before. Until something is brought to our attention, we don’t know it exists. It’s not our fault, we just didn’t know.

It’s easy to see how learning is important, without the knowledge, it’s awfully hard to take action. While learning, you’re forming your own thoughts, opinions, and guesses. These thoughts are untested in the real world; they’re deductions based solely on our own perception.

Learning is often the most seductive step in the cycle. More on this next week.

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Act

Until we take action, we are living in our own dream world stitched together by the knowledge we’ve learned. It’s by acting that we create something that can be experienced by others. We’re affecting the real world.

It’s through this creation that we begin testing our expectations against reality. And yes, taking action is work.

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Feedback

This step is overlooked, or actively avoided, by many – me included. It’s during this step that what we’ve created is perceived by others, and we learn their interpretation. It’s important to note here that feedback is occurring while taking an action as well (I’ll dive into this during Feedback’s newsletter).

These interpretations are compared with what we intended the creation to communicate.

This step is vital because these differences inform our future decisions to better communicate and grow. It’s also at this step where things can become increasingly emotional, especially if your expectations aren’t matching the feedback you’re receiving.

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After Feedback, the cycle returns to Learn, where you seek out new knowledge so that you can Act differently, and so on.

Next week we’ll dive into Learn. Until then, remember that all of these steps are important to the cycle of growth, and none of them are any harder or more scary than the others.

It’s okay to LAF a little.

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You’ve got this.

Questions for You