How do you know you are moving forward?

#programming #management #productivity #webdev

TLDR

Progress isn’t just about effort, it’s about direction. You move forward when you recognize patterns, adapt existing solutions to your context, and focus on the few actions that create the biggest results. Growth comes from learning, feedback, and alignment, not repetition.

How do you know you are moving forward?

Human life is surrounded by the anxiety of knowing if things are going as expected. Whether in childhood, youth, adulthood, or elderhood, it doesn’t matter. Humans will always seek dopamine as a way of reward. The human body and mind are strongly influenced by it.

As Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Life is a constant oscillation between the desire to have and the boredom of possessing.”

But how do you know you are moving forward? That’s a good question, and let’s dissect it below.

The Executive Challenge

In the executive field, you are constantly bombarded by deadlines and expectations, either from your leaders or yourself. Strategies, metrics, and plans must be well defined for each situation, although it is not always easy to achieve that.

For example, imagine a junior business analyst who has been requested to bring numbers about a specific company that seniors were studying for a case. By the time he presented his report, he had already reviewed three similar cases inside the company.

But the question is: Was he able to find the right approach? Which strategies could he pursue to achieve the expected result?

Problem Pattern Matching

Most problems have already been solved by someone before, and nowadays, with the internet, AIs, YouTube videos, and TikTok, solutions are widely available.

That is the moment when the ideas of Problem Pattern Matching and Smart Copy and Paste come into play.

Let’s imagine another situation: someone who has never cooked rice. What would that person do? They would probably look for references and sources on the internet, ask an AI, or watch a short video.

This is the core idea of Problem Pattern Matching: searching for patterns that already exist. That junior analyst could have applied this by looking at previous internal cases and how they had been approached.

Smart Copy and Paste

Once something relevant is found, it is time to apply the Smart Copy and Paste.

You might be wondering: “Okay, am I just going to copy and use someone else’s idea?”

Not exactly. The junior analyst should have adapted the model to his context instead of simply copying it. If he had just copied the previous report, the outcome would have been rejected by his leaders.

Instead, the solution had to be tested, adjusted, and improved. Just like I heard one: “You must adapt, not adopt.”

This is where feedback loops become essential. Solutions are improved when coworkers, leaders, or clients provide insights that help refine the final product.

Beyond the Limits

So, how do you know you are moving forward?

You know it when you can transform existing patterns into new solutions that fit your scenario, when you adapt instead of blindly copying, and when you use checkpoints and feedback loops to validate progress.

Moving forward means climbing beyond your limits, prioritizing the 20% of actions that generate 80% of results (Pareto Principle), and aligning with people who raise the bar with you.