Learn something
Do you have time to read this email, niepodam? Maybe…or maybe not. Time's work is easy to spot in people you don’t see often, like the distant nephew you met as a baby who now towers over you, or your high school friend who has somehow transformed into their own father.
It's harder to see it in yourself. Most days you’ll see at least a glimpse of yourself in a mirror or a Zoom meeting but you’re practically indistinguishable from the day before. Unless you’ve taken two decades of daily selfies, you can’t easily see that slow progression.
But of course you are changing; it’s inevitable. Not only physically, but in terms of your skills and interests, and your beliefs about the world and yourself. Those changes are sadly harder to notice than a hairline that is receding or a waistline that isn't.
Which is a shame, because when you feel stuck, or hopeless, or inadequate, looking back at where you came from and how far you’ve grown can buttress your confidence.
Learning in public
Sometimes, learning at work is an explicit act. My colleague Chrissy wrote about our support team’s Learn Something Days recently. Every person on the team takes one day a month out of the support queue to invest in their own growth. That structured, reserved time and financial support make regular deliberate growth possible.
Do you do something similar? If your own company doesn’t have a formal program, perhaps you can still carve out space to actively improve a skill, expand your interests, or tackle a new kind of work.
Recently on Buzzsprout’s Happy to Help podcast I talked about Campaign Monitor’s Kill That Question program, where my support team took time out to identify recurring support-creating product issues and work with developers to resolve them.
Keeping a record of the questions we had “killed” meant we could look back and remember a pain point we’d collectively overcome. That tangible evidence of positive change was a welcome motivation during long days in the queue.
You could do the same thing on a personal level. Keep track of things you’ve learned, skills you’ve developed, ideas you’ve acted on. That sort of work diary is very handy when it comes to review time, or finding-a-new-job time. It shows your improvement, it reminds you things that seem fixed can still change, and gives you a different perspective on your own time.
Consider working out loud by sharing your progress with others to multiply the learning impact.
