Birthdays don’t measure growth. They measure laps around the sun. Growth is what happened during the laps.

Getting a year older happens to you with no effort at all. Changing does not. The number on the cake tells you how long you have been alive, not what you did while you were, and it is easy to mistake one for the other.

Before your next birthday, name one thing you can do now that you could not do a year ago. If nothing comes to mind, pick something small you want to be able to do by the next one.