How to Accelerate Your Growth : Take up challenging projects

I was reading an excellent book called “Catalyst” which talked about how you can maximise and get more out of your learning cycles in your career. The author had pointed out that successful people seem to have participated in major learning cycles than others and they seemed to extract more experience and individual growth out of these learning cycles

Learning cycles are basically an opportunity to participate in a major project which you are part of or any new initiative that you can conceptualise where you are involved in the project from end to end presenting with lot of challenges and opportunity to grow

The same thought was echoed by my colleague who had suggested that if someone had taken up a really big and challenging feature to work on as PM or Dev, their rate of growth would be much higher than someone working on smaller items

There were some really good points mentioned in the book regarding how to take advantage of this learning cycles when you are part of a major project. One interesting point was participating at thought leadership level rather than project leadership level where you are contributing to the projects through your thoughts and ideas

The other one was increasing the intensity of your engagement and work on broader items and not just limited to your items. Another way to think about it is to work one level higher than your current organisation position

When you look back and realise why this is something that will accelerate your growth. It is probably because challenging experiences bring you out of your comfort zone and how you react when you are not in a comfortable zone is where all the growth is I feel. When it is challenging you really have to push yourself to your mental or physical limits

This would be an interesting experiment for people who feel they are stuck and are not seeing any growth. May be taking up something really challenging and seeing it through till the end will help solve the issue. I feel this is not just limited to work, even taking up some big challenges on a personal level can also be really beneficial and teach you a lot