The growth trap: Why hypergrowth is quietly breaking us

For years, hypergrowth has been sold as the ultimate career virtue. Grow faster. Rise sooner. Win at all costs. Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking what this acceleration was costing us.

Hypergrowth can make us overlook a simple truth: consistency often outweighs intensity. Careers, like relationships or health, are built to be sustained over time rather than rushed, yet the culture of rapid advancement have forced us to think otherwise.

Organizations naturally reward high performance and ambition, offering opportunities for visibility, leadership, and accelerated growth. These incentives are powerful, but they also create pressure to prioritize speed over balance.

There is a need to recognize that lasting impact comes from steady progress and well-managed priorities. Success is not only measured by how quickly one rises, but by the ability to maintain perspective, relationships, and long-term resilience.

Many who rise quickly discover that the summit is lonelier and more fragile than advertised. The dissatisfaction doesn’t come from lack of success, but from realizing how little control one has after achieving it. Corporate ascension feels a lot like climbing Everest. You don’t conquer it. You barely survive the ascent, take a picture, and rush back down before the conditions kill you.

The corporate version is similar. Titles inflate, pressure multiplies, and job security paradoxically shrinks. Nowhere is this more visible than in the growing churn at the top. CEOs are being laid off at unprecedented rates and leadership tenures shrinking. This raises an uncomfortable question: what was the point of racing upward so quick?

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American-style corporatism has turned career growth into a public performance. Success is measured in LinkedIn engagement, personal branding, and constant visibility. We mistake noise for progress and momentum for meaning. What gets lost is the quieter promise a career is supposed to offer—stability and the ability to build a life outside work.

The last five years have intensified this problem. COVID hardwired hyper connectivity into our professional DNA. Always online, always on. What began as a necessity has quietly become an addiction. Burnout for many is no longer an exception. it’s a baseline.

So, the inevitable question arises. Should we trade aspiration and rapid growth for longevity? Should we intentionally slow careers, even if it means stepping off the fast track?

For many, the answer may need to be yes.

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Slow growth is not the absence of ambition. It’s ambition with boundaries. It’s choosing sustained relevance over temporary acceleration. It is keeping friendships alive, It is maintaining interests. If one were to speak in sports parlance, Rahul Dravid’s school of Cricket has a lot to offer in corporate life as well.

There is undeniable thrill in the archetype of the hyper-scaler—the Travis Kalanicks and Adam Neumanns of the world—where growth is explosive and boundaries are blurred. But there is also quiet wisdom in a philosophy closer to Warren Buffett’s. Allow growth to compound over time, rather than forcing it through constant strain.

As we enter the new year, perhaps the next phase of work is not about seeking constant validation or doing too many things at a time. But about doing enough, for long enough. Not falling for the growth trap, but building careers that can actually hold a life. That may not be the loudest path. But it might be the one that lasts.

Views expressed are personal.