I’ve been thinking a lot recently about personal growth and, in the process, realized something important: there have always been periods in my career where I wasn’t growing. Sometimes I understood it too late. Other times, the lack of growth resulted in stagnation that ultimately harmed my team, my family, and the business.

Growth is different than performance. Often (more often than ideal), high performers experience growth pauses more than others. It’s critical to not confuse growth with performance. Growth is not the same as doing your job well. It has also been shown that growth is crucial for company retention, which is why you usually find the “Am I growing?” question on annual surveys.

For many years, I’ve done a quarterly assessment to measure growth by answering three questions.

1. Are you learning? Are you growing?
2. Are you gaining transferable skills or just learning how to cope with your current job?
3. How confident and capable do you feel in your role?

I wrote about this more here. This framework served me well for a long time, but as I grew as a leader, it started to feel insufficient. I was searching for a new lens when I came across this idea while reading Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. In the book, there’s a reflection (originally from Epictetus) that stayed with me:

“It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows.” - Epictetus, as cited in Ego Is the Enemy.

This resonated because it reminded me of a simple truth: growth depends on how you orient yourself relative to others.

A Meta Framework for Growth

In this context, I started thinking about growth not only as what you do, but who you relate to:

• A Teacher: Someone you can learn from (someone more experienced or wiser than you). This means you are intentionally seeking knowledge and growth.
• A Peer: Someone your knowledge can be tested against (someone equal). You have someone who challenges your thinking and helps you refine your understanding through dialogue.
• A Student: Someone you can teach (someone less experienced). Student forces you to articulate and apply your knowledge in new ways.

This framework struck me as a useful meta model for growth. These levers don’t measure performance. They measure growth conditions.

I didn’t have a teacher for a very long time. Could that be why my growth felt stalled?

We often ask, especially in leadership roles, whether someone has mentored others, and sometimes even make it a prerequisite for promotion. There is an obvious aspect to this: when you mentor, you create leverage and maximize your impact in the organization. That’s what is expected from a leader.

But it’s less discussed that mentoring is fundamentally about teaching. When you teach someone, you are practicing the third component of the framework.

So what about the other two components?

• Learning and growing with peers is the most obvious and visible lever, yet it is often overlooked. Who are you learning with?
• Having a teacher is critical. If you don’t have someone to learn from, that can itself be a sign that growth has slowed or stopped.

The subtle trap here is ego. The more experience you have, the more likely it is that ego can convince you that you don’t need a teacher. But that’s exactly when you need one most.

A teacher doesn’t have to be from your company or professional circle, it can be anyone: someone from the internet, a neighbor, a former colleague, anyone whose perspective challenges you.

The Mathematics of Growth

In many careers (especially technical ones), almost everyone who passes the basic bar eventually reaches a “senior” level. Some companies even treat this as a terminal point with a defined progression timeline. But after that, growth becomes hard to define.

You can learn more stuff, but does that necessarily mean you’re growing? For me personally, merely accumulating knowledge is not enough.

So what’s the formula? I don’t think there is one. But having a teacher, a peer, and a student creates necessary, if not fully sufficient conditions for growth to happen.