Growth == Discomfort

This may not come as a shock to you, but in order to grow in anything you will need to put yourself through discomfort.  When you are a child, the process of your body growing can give you what's referred to as growing pains. A child's bones grow causing pain, the ligaments and muscles stretch and grow to accommodate this and it is an uncomfortable experience.  This is not done intentionally, it's just part of life.

There are however places where you have to choose discomfort in order to grow.  A place that I have experience with growth and discomfort is in lifting weights.  In order to get your muscles to grow and your body to get stronger, you have to lift a weight that is heavy enough to cause mild damage.  That damage is the cue to your body that it needs to rebuild itself even stronger than before to handle the loads you are putting on it.  This stimulus can be mildly to extremely uncomfortable, but it is the only way to get your muscles to grow.

Now professionally, it can be easy to coast by and never really put yourself into a position of discomfort, especially if you are talented, to begin with (this is not a problem I have to deal with, but I digress).  To truly grow as a developer you need to put yourself into positions of discomfort.

Training is one place that can be uncomfortable.  It's Monday night, you have 2 hours before you go to bed and you now have to decide what to do.  Do you tune into the Football game, binge some Netflix or do you watch Pluralsight training on something you are unfamiliar with or maybe do a code kata?  Do you coast, or do you grow?

At work, you are presented with two projects, one that you know you can crank out quickly because you have years of experience on it or one in a technology you have barely touched?  This can be extremely difficult, because accomplishing tasks is highly praised, while grinding through tasks and barely completing them in time is not.  The business wants things done, and your growth while useful is not their top priority.  The choice to grow is yours, but it will not be without discomfort.  You will need to live with the pressure and the risk of failure, but that risk of failure is the only way to grow.

With lifting weights, there is a concept called progressive resistance, which means to slowly and steadily increase the amount of work that is being done.  This can be by increasing the weight, increasing the reps, or slowing down the tempo to increase difficulty.  This is fairly easy to do because you have control over what weights you'll be lifting.  Professionally you don't always get those nice easy incremental changes.  You want to try and take a task that is just out of your reach now, but not one that will crush you nor one that you can do without any hard work, that can be difficult as we don't always have a say in what tasks we will need to do.  The takeaway here though is that if there is little to no chance of failure, there is little to no chance for growth.

Don't be the guy at the gym that consistently comes in and does the same weight for the same reps week after week year after year and wonders why he hasn't grown and don't be the developer that works on the same types of tasks over and over and wonders why he's pigeon holed.  Push your limits, risk failure and embrace the discomfort.