Measuring personal growth

Chip Huyen published a blog post describing how she thinks about measuring personal growth, prompted by founder friends who track business metrics such as reaching $10M ARR from $1M ARR or growing from 1,000 to 10,000 users. She writes that she does not want to use net worth or follower counts as metrics.

After talking with friends, Huyen outlines three metrics: rate of change, time to solve problems, and number of future options. She calls the post a thought exercise rather than a rigorous experiment, and notes that some friends told her they find it mildly sociopathic, arguing life is to be lived rather than measured. Huyen responds that she does not see measuring and living as mutually exclusive.

On rate of change, Huyen says she has a theory that life has a circadian rhythm and that every 3-6 years a person becomes different, changing problems, lifestyle, and social circles. She cites the rule of 72, shared by a friend named Sami, and wonders whether she could treat herself as an investment and measure growth by how long it takes to become a new person.

On time to solve problems, Huyen cites Quynh, who runs a publishing house in Vietnam and believes career, family, and finance each take about a decade to figure out. Huyen lists her own big problems as career, finance, social, immigration, family, and health, and notes that visa anxiety ended with a green card.

On future options, Huyen cites empowerment maximization from a reinforcement learning course, and says she leans toward decisions that maximize future options, such as choosing jobs with more future options even at lower pay. She disputes a theory, relayed by a friend named Denys, that half of your dreams die every few years.

Huyen concludes with three heuristics: becoming a new person every 3-6 years, solving big problems quickly to create safety nets, and maximizing future options. She says these work for her so far given a bias toward novelty and exploration, and may change if that changes.