To Grow is To Dream Bigger

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

If you’re living in the tech/startup scene, by now, you would’ve accustomed to the magic word: growth. Every companies are looking for growth, often a hyper one. In order to achieve that, their employees also seek a way to grow. In an event where one quits a startup company, he/she would proudly proclaim that in a short time span, he/she has found significant growth (this statement is often time, true).

But what is grow? How to measure that I’m actually growing?

Took me very long time to understand this. I don’t think there’s an exact metric that can quantify this. However, several strings of events helped me to realize one thing: to grow is to dream bigger.

Let me illustrate this through an anecdotal example. When a junior engineer onboards a company, she’s very eager to start contributing code. At this stage, her dream is to correctly implement a fix to a specific issue. As time goes by, she starts to be able to see things differently. She gets the bigger vision of the product and starts contributing from a strategic portion, perhaps from choosing a specific architecture for a new feature or how to nurture newer talents so that the organization can move faster. Years goes and now she has even bigger vision and she has the ability to correlate what the market demands and how it should translate to product and engineering decisions. This is how she grows, aligned with the organization’s growth.

What I want to highlight from that story isn’t just about a person’s growth. But rather, this state of growth requires 2 precondition that should be fulfilled:

1. A person’s accumulated increase in skill, that enabled seeing things from different, wider perspective
2. An organization’s blessing to afford a person with avenue to dream bigger

I personally believe that as a company grows bigger, the nuance to achieve its initial vision gets more detailed, for better or for worse. Hence, what it has to do is to give opportunity to its employee to grow, to see from different lenses and ultimately to achieve the dream together.

Let’s go big.