Sometimes You Don’t Know You’ve Reached the Next Level Until You Look Back

We talk a lot about getting to the “next level.”

It has become one of those phrases that we use almost automatically.

We want to take our careers to the next level. We want to take our businesses to the next level. We want to take our relationships, finances, education, or personal development to the next level.

But I have often wondered whether we actually recognize the moment when it happens.

Because sometimes the next level does not arrive with an announcement.

Sometimes there is no promotion.

There is no graduation ceremony.

There is no award.

There is no moment where somebody walks up to you and says:

Congratulations. You are now a different person.

Sometimes you only recognize it years later.

For me, one of those moments happened during the summer of 1990 at Army ROTC Advanced Camp.

I Thought I Knew What Success Looked Like

When I returned to the University of Tampa in the fall of 1989, a lot of things in my life were changing.

I was 20 years old.

I had recently pledged the fraternity I had wanted to join. I was moving deeper into the substantive courses required for my biology degree. Organic chemistry was waiting for me. My ROTC training was becoming more serious. And somewhere in the distance was Advanced Camp during the summer of 1990.

At the time, I probably would have described all of those things as separate events.

Looking back, they weren't.

I was growing up.

More importantly, I was beginning to figure out what kind of man I wanted to become.

And I didn't realize it yet.

Advanced Camp mattered tremendously for an ROTC cadet. Your performance could affect whether you were competitive for active duty, and I went there knowing that performance mattered.

I wanted to do well.

I wanted to compete.

I wanted to prove myself.

And because I was in one of the earlier and more competitive cycles, I understood that simply being good might not be enough. There were a lot of talented cadets around me trying to distinguish themselves too.

Then something happened during a physical fitness test that changed the way I looked at the entire experience.

A Choice That Probably Hurt My Score

During the run, I noticed another cadet struggling.

He had apparently injured or pulled something in his leg and was falling behind.

Cadets were running past him.

And understandably so.

Everybody had a score to worry about.

Everybody had something at stake.

Everybody was competing.

I initially ran past him too.

Then something in me said:

Go back.

So I did.

I ran alongside him.

I encouraged him.

I tried to help him pick up his pace and get across the finish line with a better time.

And while I was doing that, other cadets continued running past us.

I knew exactly what was happening.

Every second I spent helping him was potentially hurting my own score.

And strangely enough, I became okay with that.

That may have been one of the first times in my young adult life when I consciously confronted a question that would follow me throughout the rest of my life:

What does it mean to succeed if succeeding requires me to ignore somebody who needs help?

I don't remember having some grand philosophical conversation with myself at the time.

I simply knew that I could not comfortably run past him.

Years later, however, I realize that the decision told me something about myself.

I was beginning to decide what kind of leader I wanted to be.

Leadership Became Something Different

Something changed for me after that.

Until then, a lot of my thinking about leadership had been tied to performance.

Do well.

Get the score.

Earn the rating.

Demonstrate competence.

Beat the standard.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. Standards matter. Competence matters. Performance matters.

But I began to understand that leadership could not simply be reduced to outperforming the person standing next to me.

For the remainder of Advanced Camp, I started approaching the experience differently.

When I made mistakes, I tried to learn from them.

When senior NCOs and officers corrected me, I listened.

When something did not go the way I wanted, I became less interested in protecting my ego and more interested in figuring out what the experience was trying to teach me.

And believe me, I made mistakes.

I did some things that I would probably handle very differently today.

But something important was happening.

I was becoming comfortable with the idea that making a mistake did not mean I was a failure.

It meant I had something to learn.

That was a major shift for me.

Then I Got a 3A

At the end of Advanced Camp, cadets were rated.

The ratings mattered.

If you were hoping to be especially competitive for active duty, you wanted to be near the top.

I received a 3A.

On paper, that wasn't the outcome I had originally imagined for myself.

And yet something surprising happened.

I wasn't devastated.

I wasn't angry.

I didn't leave believing that the experience had been a failure.

Quite the opposite.

I left knowing more about myself than I knew when I arrived.

Then I went to Fort Benning for Airborne School.

And when I eventually returned to the University of Tampa, I felt different.

Not because somebody had handed me a title.

Not because I had suddenly mastered adulthood.

Not because I had stopped making mistakes.

I simply felt more settled in who I was.

I Stopped Trying to Lead Like Everybody Else

One of the most important lessons I brought home from that summer was the realization that my leadership style did not have to look like someone else's.

That sounds obvious to me today.

It wasn't obvious to me at 21.

When you're young and surrounded by talented people, comparison can become almost automatic.

Who is stronger?

Who is faster?

Who received the better evaluation?

Who seems more confident?

Who looks more like what a leader is “supposed” to look like?

I had spent so much time measuring myself against my peers that I had not seriously considered the possibility that the way I operated might be perfectly legitimate for me.

Advanced Camp began to change that.

I could learn from other leaders without becoming them.

I could receive criticism without believing that everything about me needed to be reconstructed.

I could make mistakes without concluding that I didn't belong.

And perhaps most importantly, I could care about the person beside me without believing that their success somehow diminished mine.

That was my next level.

Sometimes Growth Is Visible to Everyone Except You

When I returned to campus, something else happened that I still find fascinating.

Other people noticed the change.

People who knew me before that summer—peers and individuals involved in university leadership and residence life—could see something different about me.

That may have been the first time I experienced personal growth almost in real time.

I had gone away one version of myself.

I came back another.

Not completely formed.

Nobody ever really is.

But more fully realized than I had been before.

And I think that is what we sometimes misunderstand when we talk about reaching the next level.

We imagine climbing.

We imagine achievement.

We imagine arriving somewhere higher than where we started.

But sometimes the next level isn't about moving higher.

Sometimes it is about moving deeper.

Deeper into your values.

Deeper into your identity.

Deeper into an understanding of what matters to you.

The Next Level May Not Look Like Winning

If you had asked 20-year-old me what success at Advanced Camp would look like, I probably would have talked about evaluations, scores, rankings, and active duty.

Those things mattered.

But more than three decades later, none of them is the first thing I remember.

I remember a cadet struggling during a run.

I remember making the decision to stay with him.

I remember watching other people pass us.

And I remember reaching a strange sense of peace with the possibility that helping someone else might cost me something.

Maybe that was the real evaluation.

Not the one written on a piece of paper.

The one happening inside me.

Because sometimes the moment that reveals who you're becoming doesn't happen when you're standing on a stage receiving recognition.

Sometimes it happens when nobody is paying attention and you have to decide what matters more:

Your position in the race—or the person struggling beside you.

I arrived at Advanced Camp trying to prove that I was ready for the next level.

I left realizing that I had already begun reaching it.

I just didn't know what the next level actually looked like yet.