You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you: You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth are the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

Growth demands you choose transformation

Most of us think growth happens to us—we get older, we move jobs, life pushes us into new situations. But this quote points to something more active and almost uncomfortable: you have to actually want to be transformed by what happens. That's different from just surviving change or grudgingly adapting to it.

The tricky part is that genuine growth requires something most of us resist. It means staying open when your instinct is to defend what you already know. When someone gives you hard feedback, when a relationship ends, when you fail at something important—these are the moments growth is available. But you have to choose to let them change you instead of just waiting for time to dull the sting. You have to sit with the discomfort rather than rush past it with a lesson learned and move on.

What makes this less obvious today is how we're trained to be efficient and bounce back quickly. But real growth isn't a box you check. It's the slow, sometimes messy process of letting your previous self become slightly obsolete so a different version can emerge. That's terrifying and worth it.