Was the You of a Month Ago an Idiot?

If you want to feel your own growth directly, write a diary every day.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

If your thinking from a month ago looks completely stupid, you are growing fast. If the window shrinks to a week, or a day, you are growing very fast.

That is the growth metric I set for myself. It sounds crude, but I think it is accurate.

A raise, a promotion, a better score, all of these count, but they are lagging indicators. They are outcomes, and by the time you see them the growth happened long ago. I wanted a leading indicator that tells me in real time whether I am growing and how fast. The answer is how soon I start to feel that my past self did not think hard enough.

That is what a diary is for. It pins down what you thought at the time and gives you a baseline. Without it you cannot tell whether you improved, because memory quietly edits your past self to look a little smarter.

Not every diary works this way. Where you went, what you ate, how you felt, that kind of diary has value, but it does little for how you think. What helps more is writing down your reasoning, your judgment on a problem, the logic behind a decision, what you weighed and what you ruled out. Read it again later and you can see which variable you missed and which one you overrated.

The other hurdle is being willing to admit you were wrong.

Many people can see the flaws when they reread old thoughts, but they defend their past selves. Not enough information, different circumstances, too much pressure. Admitting that I simply did not think deeply enough is the step that actually gets you out. Rejecting your past self does not mean you were bad. It means you are stronger now. It is a relative comparison, not an absolute verdict.

The shorter the window, the faster the iteration. Once a year is ten iterations in ten years. Once a month is a hundred and twenty. Once a week is over five hundred. And each round makes the next one faster. That is compounding.

Someone who always thinks they were right back then stays exactly where they were back then.

So write two paragraphs tonight. What problem you ran into, and how you thought about it. Open it next month, and see whether the person you are then thinks the person you are now is a bit of an idiot.