How you can grow in your testing career...

It is imperative for everyone to grow in their career with learning and understanding new aspects and improving knowledge and technical skills. Just like anything else we need to plan and follow what we want to achieve. I'm here by providing my inputs on how you can grow in your career and at the same time enjoy what you do the best. (Yes, I mean software testing):

1. Identify your interest areas - This is very important aspect to consider and you should do what you want to do and not just do something which is imposed on you. Identify your strengths and identify what are the areas that you likes working most. From a career point of you identify whether do you want to work as a Individual Contributor stream or you want to Managerial stream. Both have their own pros and cons and you are the best judge of what is most suitable to you. Similarly from technical side, you should think about what kind of testing you want to perform e.g. Functional, Penetration, Performance, Security, Automation etc. All of these are equally good and you can follow similar growth levels in any of these fields. Select a career choice and work towards building relevant skills.
2. Identify skills that you want to improve - Identify what are the skills you want to develop. Make short term or long term goals and follow them. e.g. for a short term you may want to learn something related to your work, domain or technology that may help you do your job better on a project or an assignment. For long term you may want to learn new automation tool or new language say Perl. It is important that you focus on few things rather selecting too many things at a same time and then failing to focus on something. You can take help from your friends, team members, leads, or other resources like internet, books, training course etc. This will help you in learning these skills better and faster.   
3. Learn new Technology, Tools, Techniques and Approach - Spend some time i learning the technology in which the product is built upon. Even though you may not needed to knwo this directly but rather it will give you knwoledge of how application works and will help breaking the same in more effectively. Always be on lookout for learning new techniques and approaches. This will help you improvise when needed as you will have spectrum of choices to solve one problem and you will become more effective. Believe that 'things can be better if tried differently'. Similarly learn new tools that helps that may help you more productive, some of the tools that you may want to focus might be, Automation tools, Performance testing tools, Security testing tools, Test data generator tools etc. You can some some of the tools that best fit your need and learn them. 
4. Challenge yourself - No challenge is better and fruitful than challenging yourself. It is the most important and enjoying than anything else. Identify few areas and try to make yourself sweat with the challenges. Try to do things faster in lesser time, try to learn something in short duration, try to minimize test cases (still keeping the effectiveness) etc. Also try to spend some time for physical activities to keep yourself fit by involving your-self to some sort of activity jogging, gyming or playing some sports. 
5. Read books and Read blogs of industry thought leaders - Try to spend some time of the day (may be an hour atleast) reading blogs on the net. It will give you new perspective to various situations that other people faces and it's a very good mechanism to get different perspective. Also read books related to your interest areas. This will help you clear any doubts and help you learn things comprehensively and in details.
6. Share your thoughts with other and learn - Share your ideas, thoughts, knowledge with others within your teams, blogs, forums, groups. Discuss your point of view with others and see how people think about it. This will help you get lot of insights to certain areas and thoughts and in the process you will find new, interesting and useful skills, techniques, approaches and methods.

Remember - Knowledge is what separates success with luck...