Career Stuck at 3 Years? Only 3 Outcomes Remain

Three years is usually a major milestone in a career. If you haven't seen a significant promotion by then, there are only three possibilities—

1. The company's business is stagnating, so there has been no meaningful growth over the past three years.
The most effective way to get promoted often isn't through personal effort alone, which contradicts what many people assume. Instead, it comes from rapid business expansion within the company—meaning that as long as you're a tenured employee, you'll likely get promoted. For example, employees who joined Tencent before 2009 and stayed past 2011 were generally promoted to director-level positions. Those with outstanding performance could reach that level in as little as three years, because between 2010 and 2012, Tencent's headcount surged from under 10,000 to over 20,000, and now stands at around 50,000.
So if you joined Tencent before 2009 and performed adequately, you could be promoted quickly—three years to director, for instance. But if you joined after 2016? Unless you're exceptionally outstanding, you might not even become a team leader within ten years.
In most cases, the reason people don't get promoted is simply because their company's business isn't growing.

2. Your performance hasn't objectively met your manager's expectations, so they don't trust you enough. You've likely asked for a promotion multiple times, but your boss has repeatedly turned you down.

3. It's been three years without a promotion, yet you still plan to stay in this job, and your manager isn't inclined to promote you either. In that case, you've likely developed a kind of career complacency—meaning you feel this job is decent, comfortable, and offers good value for your effort, so you don't want to leave. You want a promotion, your boss won't give it to you, but you still resist moving on. This kind of subjective inertia is dangerous in my view. (It means you're being paid more than your actual worth.)

I believe that if you haven't been promoted within three years at a company, you should leave—otherwise, you'll inevitably fall into career complacency. Eventually, your skills won't improve, nor will your income or position, and you'll gradually become mediocre.
And it's not just about the workplace—the same pattern applies to life as a whole. Basically, every three years is a hurdle. In adult life, if you don't see clear progress by then, it means you're not actually moving forward.
Life doesn't just stay the same, especially not the version you think satisfies you. Simply maintaining that status quo until you grow old won't cut it. #ReadingNotes