MICRO MISCONCEPTS

The Lonely Chapter of Growth

24th October 2025 | misconcepts.org

In the beginning, growth feels exciting and everyone cheers you on. In the end, growth feels rewarding and everyone congratulates you. But there’s a stage of growth in between that nobody prepares you for, a stage where you are all by yourself.

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The Lonely Chapter

As you grow and develop yourself, there will inevitably be some people who feel threatened, who won’t like it, who can’t understand it, or who criticize you for it. People won’t like that you have changed. People you used to be close with will start to feel more distant and you enter a period of loneliness where your old friends don’t quite get you anymore but you’re not quite there with your new community yet. You’re caught in the middle, feeling like you belong nowhere.

This is the lonely chapter. The chapter between who you were and who you’re becoming.

This is the point where growth feels most painful and where people abandon their growth journeys. They retreat to old patterns and old relationships to escape the discomfort of not fitting in. I too have navigated this treacherous zone and failed multiple times, until I finally learnt: loneliness during growth isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

During this lonely chapter, it’s just you. You have to cheer for yourself, encourage yourself and keep going despite the mounting doubts and uncertainty. This is made all the harder by our evolutionary wiring to crave social acceptance and belonging.

However, when something grows, it naturally outgrows what it was before. When you grow, you naturally outgrow the spaces designed for who you used to be.

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Jay Shetty captures this beautifully:

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Rather than seeing isolation as a sign that I’m doing something wrong, I’ve learnt to see it as a sign of growth.

People will say things like “you’ve changed” with a disapproving tone. But when someone tells me "you've changed," I've adopted entrepreneur Alex Hormozi's brilliant response: "I should hope so." I'd be worried if I was identical to who I was last year, let alone a decade ago. If we're constantly learning and error-correcting, of course we would change.

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Tim Ferriss offers another perspective:

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Making the Change

What changes are you avoiding because you're afraid of who you might lose along the way? What if that loss is actually making space for something better?

Remember: The lonely chapter is a sign that you are growing.

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Thanks for reading!

Learn more at misconcepts.org

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