How to Know If You're Growing or Just Getting Older

You’ve been in your role for three years. You’re better at it than when you started. You know the systems, the people, the unwritten rules. You’re efficient.

But when you’re honest with yourself, you’re not sure you’re actually growing. You’re just faster at doing the same things. You haven’t learned anything fundamentally new in months. You could probably do this job in your sleep.

And you’re starting to wonder: am I building my career, or am I just getting older?

The problem isn’t that you’re not working hard. It’s that you’ve stopped learning, and you haven’t noticed.

The Problem

Most people measure career growth by external markers: promotions, raises, titles, years of experience. By these measures, you’re progressing. You have more experience now than you did three years ago. Your resume looks better. Your salary has increased.

But these markers don’t tell you if you’re actually developing new capabilities. You might have five years of experience, or you might have one year of experience repeated five times. The resume looks the same either way.

The difference shows up in ways that are harder to measure. Are you solving harder problems than you were two years ago, or just solving the same problems more efficiently? Are you taking on challenges that stretch your abilities, or staying comfortably within what you already know how to do? Are you building skills that increase your options, or just getting better at your specific job?

You can go years without realizing you’ve stagnated. The work still feels busy. You’re still getting positive feedback for being reliable and competent. You’re hitting your targets. Everything looks fine from the outside.

But inside, you’re bored. Work that used to challenge you now feels routine. You’re going through the motions. You’re not excited about what you’re working on because you’ve already worked on this type of thing a dozen times before. And the thought of doing this for another five years makes you want to quit, but you’re not sure what else you’d do because you haven’t actually developed new capabilities.

Why this happens to knowledge workers

Most jobs have a learning curve that’s steep at first and then flattens dramatically. In the first six to twelve months, you’re learning constantly—new tools, new processes, new domain knowledge, new relationships. Growth is obvious and rapid.

But once you’ve mastered the basics of your role, growth becomes optional rather than automatic. You can continue learning and expanding your capabilities, or you can stay within your comfort zone and just get more efficient at what you already know. Most jobs don’t force you to keep growing—they just require you to keep performing.

Research suggests that expertise develops through deliberate practice—specifically working on challenges at the edge of your current ability. But many people stop doing this once they’re competent. They optimize for efficiency and comfort rather than growth, which means they stop improving even as they accumulate years of experience.

Many people find that they wake up five or ten years into their career and realize they’re not substantially more capable than they were years ago. They’re better at navigating their specific company and role, but they haven’t developed the kind of skills that would open new doors or create new options. They’ve been mistaking comfort for mastery and experience for growth.

What Most People Try

When people start to feel stagnant, they usually try to fix it by adding more. They take online courses. They attend conferences. They read books about their industry. They collect certifications and credentials.

This feels like growth because you’re learning new information. But information isn’t capability. You can read ten books about project management without actually getting better at managing projects. You can take a course on leadership without developing any leadership skills. You’re consuming content about growth rather than actually growing.

The problem is that most learning happens through doing, not through studying. You develop skills by applying them to increasingly difficult challenges, getting feedback, and adjusting. But when people try to grow through courses and books, they skip the application part. They’re learning in theory, not in practice.

Other people try to fix stagnation by changing jobs. They assume that a new role will automatically create growth because there will be new things to learn. And this often works for six to twelve months—the new job has a learning curve, you’re developing new skills, you feel like you’re growing again.

But then the pattern repeats. You master the new role, you get comfortable, and you stop growing again. Because the problem isn’t the job—it’s that you haven’t developed the habit of deliberately seeking challenges that stretch your capabilities.

Both approaches treat growth as something external that happens to you—a course you take, a job you get. But real growth is internal. It’s about how you approach your work and what you demand of yourself, not about what opportunities are handed to you.

What Actually Helps

1. Track capability, not accomplishments

Most people measure their career in terms of what they’ve done: projects completed, goals hit, deliverables shipped. But accomplishments don’t necessarily equal growth. You can accomplish the same type of thing repeatedly without developing new capabilities.

Better measure: what can you do now that you couldn’t do a year ago? Not what you’ve done, but what you’ve become capable of. This focuses attention on skill development rather than output.

The key is to be specific about capabilities, not vague. “I’m a better communicator” is too general to be meaningful. “I can now facilitate difficult conversations between stakeholders with opposing interests and guide them to consensus” is a specific capability that you either have or don’t have.

Start tracking this explicitly. Every quarter, write down: what new capability have I developed in the last three months? What can I do now that I couldn’t do before? What type of problem can I solve now that would have been beyond me before?

If you struggle to identify any new capabilities, that’s important information. It means you’ve been operating within your existing skill set, just applying it repeatedly. You’re getting more efficient but not more capable.

Once you start tracking capability development, you can be deliberate about creating opportunities to build new ones. Instead of just taking whatever work comes your way, you can actively seek projects that will require you to develop skills you don’t currently have.

This might mean volunteering for a project that’s slightly outside your comfort zone, asking to take on responsibilities that stretch your abilities, or deliberately practicing skills that your current role doesn’t naturally develop.

The goal isn’t to develop random capabilities—it’s to be intentional about building the specific skills that matter for where you want your career to go. But you can’t be intentional if you’re not tracking what you’re actually developing.

2. Seek challenges at the edge of your ability, not in your comfort zone

Growth happens when you’re working on problems that are hard enough to stretch your capabilities but not so hard that you’re completely overwhelmed. This is called the “learning zone”—just beyond what you can comfortably do.

Most people spend the majority of their time in the “comfort zone”—doing work they already know how to do. This is necessary and appropriate for much of your work. You can’t be in learning mode constantly. But if you spend all your time in the comfort zone, you stop growing.

The challenge is that once you’re competent at your job, staying in your comfort zone is the default. You’ll naturally gravitate toward doing more of what you’re already good at because it’s easier and more efficient. Growth requires deliberately choosing harder problems even when you could coast on what you already know.

This doesn’t mean you need to be struggling constantly. It means that some portion of your work—maybe 20% of your time—should feel challenging in a way that requires you to develop new capabilities or deepen existing ones.

Here’s how to identify whether your current work is in your learning zone: Do you regularly encounter problems where you’re not immediately sure how to solve them? Are you developing new approaches or just applying existing templates? Do you sometimes fail or struggle, or does everything feel smooth and predictable?

If everything feels comfortable and predictable, you’re not in your learning zone. You need harder problems.

You can create this artificially even if your job doesn’t naturally provide it. Volunteer for projects that require skills you want to develop. Take on challenges that force you to figure out new approaches. Ask your manager for stretch assignments. If your current role has no room for this, that’s a sign you might need to change roles to keep growing.

3. Build things that didn’t exist before, not just maintain what does

One of the clearest indicators of growth is creation. Are you building new things—new processes, new products, new relationships, new capabilities—or are you primarily maintaining and optimizing what already exists?

Maintenance work is necessary and valuable. Keeping systems running, serving existing customers, executing established processes—this is how organizations function. But maintenance work doesn’t develop growth the way creation does.

Creation forces you to solve problems you haven’t solved before. You have to figure out what’s needed, design an approach, test and iterate, deal with uncertainty. These challenges develop capabilities that maintenance work doesn’t.

This doesn’t mean you need to be in a highly creative role. It means that some portion of your work should involve making something that didn’t exist before, even if it’s small. Maybe you create a new process that makes your team more effective. Maybe you build a relationship with a stakeholder that opens new opportunities. Maybe you develop a framework that helps others solve a recurring problem.

The key is that you’re adding something to the world rather than just keeping existing things running. When you look back on the past year, you should be able to point to specific things that exist because of you, not just things you helped maintain.

Here’s the test: if you left your role tomorrow, what would disappear? If the answer is “nothing—someone else would just do what I do,” that suggests you’re primarily doing maintenance work. If the answer includes specific things you’ve created, relationships you’ve built, or improvements you’ve made that wouldn’t have happened without you, that’s evidence of creation.

Start deliberately building something, even if it’s small. A tool that solves a problem. A document that captures knowledge. A relationship that creates new opportunities. A process that makes work easier. These don’t need to be grand innovations—just things that add value and didn’t exist before you made them.

The Takeaway

Real career growth isn’t measured by years of experience or job titles—it’s measured by expanding capabilities. Track what you can do now that you couldn’t do before, not just what you’ve accomplished. Regularly work on challenges at the edge of your ability rather than staying in your comfort zone. And create things that didn’t exist rather than just maintaining what already does. If you’re repeating the same year over and over, change what you’re working on or how you’re working on it. Growth is a choice, not an automatic result of time.