How to Realize Your Growth is in the Wrong Direction
I once spent six months getting really good at something that wasn’t helping me with my growth at all.
It was a system I’d built for managing my writing projects. Color-coded, cross-referenced, beautifully organized across three different apps that all talked to each other in ways that made me proud of what I’d accomplished. I had spent an embarrassing amount of time refining it and knew exactly where everything was. I could pull up any project at a moment’s notice and tell you precisely where it stood.
The only problem was that I was spending more time managing the system than actually writing.
I had grown in organization, in efficiency, and in the particular skill of building elaborate productivity structures. I just hadn’t grown in the direction that actually mattered for the work I was supposed to be doing.
When a writer friend gently pointed this out over tea one afternoon, my first reaction was defensive. I’d put real effort into that system. It worked beautifully. And she wasn’t wrong that I needed some kind of organization.
But she was also right. I had been growing, just sideways.
The Tree Growth Coming from the Wrong Light
Plants do this too, actually. It’s called phototropism. The way a plant will grow toward whatever light source is available, even if that light source isn’t the best one for it. A houseplant near a window will bend itself almost in half reaching toward the glass. Left long enough without being rotated, it grows lopsided, putting all its energy into one direction at the expense of everything else.
It’s still growing. It’s just growing crooked.
Psalm 1 is careful about this. The blessed person doesn’t just grow. They grow in a specific direction, rooted in a specific source. The warning at the beginning of the psalm isn’t about people who stopped growing. It’s about people who grew in the wrong company, toward the wrong influences, in directions that pulled them away from what was true rather than deeper into it.
Walking in the counsel of the wicked. Standing in the way of sinners. Sitting in the seat of mockers. Each step is a small lean toward a different light source. None of them dramatic on their own. All of them, over time, producing a lopsided tree.
How We Drift Without Noticing
The tricky thing about growing in the wrong direction is that it rarely announces itself. Nobody wakes up and decides to orient their life around something that won’t hold them. It happens the way my productivity system happened. One reasonable decision at a time, each one making sense in the moment, until you look up and realize the whole thing has quietly shifted.
A little more time with people who feed cynicism than with people who build faith. A slow drift toward content that leaves you anxious and comparing rather than grounded and grateful. A gradual reorientation around what looks productive rather than what’s actually fruitful.
The drift is subtle. The cumulative effect isn’t. There’s a song I love by Casting Crowns from 2008 that speaks exactly to this. It’s called Slow Fade.
This is exactly why Psalm 1 starts with blessed is the one who does not before it ever gets to what the blessed person does do. Sometimes the most important growth question isn’t what am I reaching toward but what am I leaning away from without realizing it.
Reorienting our Growth Without Shame
Noticing you’ve been growing in the wrong direction is not a reason for a shame spiral. It’s just information. And information is where reorientation starts.
I dismantled most of that elaborate project management system on a Thursday afternoon. Kept the parts that were actually useful, let go of the parts that were just impressive. Started putting the time back into the writing itself. It felt a little like admitting something, and also a little like exhaling.
A crooked plant can be rotated. A lopsided tree can be pruned and trained. The growth that went sideways isn’t wasted. Sometimes it teaches you exactly what direction you actually need to go.
The water is still there. The roots can still find it. You just have to turn back toward the right light.
Two books that address this topic and are phenomenal reads are The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson and The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.
This month, our theme is GROW — Get Rooted On the Word. And sometimes growing rooted means being honest about the moments we’ve been reaching toward something else. Not with condemnation, but with the quiet courage to rotate back toward the source that actually sustains us.
Join the Conversation
Have you ever put a lot of effort into a system, a habit, or a project only to realize it wasn’t actually moving you in the direction you wanted to go? What did you do when you figured it out?
Share in the comments. Your story might be exactly the encouragement someone else needs today.
For the more personal areas where you suspect you might be leaning toward the wrong light right now, go to your journal to get honest about that. No audience, no performance. Just you and the page and the God who already sees it all without flinching.
