It's very easy to track your growth as a software engineer; if you look at code you wrote 6 months ago, can spot errors and reasons why the code could have been better then you've made progress.
This is another reason why refactoring is very important in projects, a lot of organizations pay lip service to improving their code base (refactoring) because of the belief that if it works it doesn't need to be fixed.
I believe looking backwards is a good way to move forward at times. As software engineers we tend to forget how far we've come in the journey, instead, We focus on how much lies ahead. Being goal driven is great however, it might sometimes delude developers into thinking that they're not growing.