Progress: A Misunderstanding
What Is Progress?
We have a romanticized view of production, productivity, and progress.
We imagine progress as something linear.
A “effort/time = progress” basic equation.
But mastery is a work in progress.
From a cursory shallow view, it can certainly appear to be a linear progress.
Started snowboarding in 2010. Fast forward to 2023 and yeah….it can feel like you’ve progressed steadily in improvement. When giving a synopsis of your journey, it can feel and be communicated to others as a straight-forward steady progress.
But it’s an oversimplification of that process.
There are ebbs and flows.
Valleys and peaks.
Trials and tribulations.
Good days and bad days.
Things can be stressful, seem to not go well, be frustrating, feel stagnant, and feel like they regress.
Things can plateau, require additional time for proficiency, need to be unlearned, and all the rest.
Progress is not straightforward.
Progress is also not unidirectional.
Progress in Skill A Does Not Mean Progress in Skill B.
It can also be essential to recognize that progress in Skill A does not mean progress in Skill B.
It also means that progress in Skill B when monitoring progress in Skill A may not be noticed.
Finally, it is important to recognize that progress in Skill A or B is not helpful if they aren’t actually what you actually want to accomplish. Nor are they your primary focus if they are simply skills aimed to help you along the way.
For example, let’s say you buy a new car. 0 miles. Brand new. Never been driven.
You can progress in driving skill, optimizing performance, fuel efficiency, monetary resale retention, monitor for air/fuel efficiency and whatever else.
You can choose a manual transmission car over automatic transmission for fuel efficiency, a more engaged driving experience, and a cheaper transmission.
Some might say that is progress is progress regardless, but if you arer progressing in an area you are not intent or deliberate in improving, then is that progression valuable to you?
For example, progressing in your knowledge in car fuel efficiency, driving maneuverability, and performance optimization means nothing if you simply got a car to get you from Destination A to Destination B, from home to work to do your passion project.
In that same vein, you can get so focused on what experts say about progress and the nitty-gritty of something, that you lose focus on what you want to personally extract from the experience.
For example, in woodworking, you can focus on the grain direction, the type of joinery, the type of detailing, the wood species, the type of finish and everything in between, but those things are only important if you care and enjoy those details. If you only want to build something out of wood to facilitate its use in another project that you are actually interested in, then getting bogged down in those woodworking details is not useful productivity or progress.
If I want to build a wood ramp to practice skateboarding on, then who cares about grain direction, joinery, type of finish, and the craftsmanship. I care about skateboarding progress, not woodworking progress.
So what does progress look like to you?
When you set out to do something:
Is it writing 1000 words when you set out to write a book or write more regularly?
Is it trying a new technique, style of art, or using a new tool? Being comfortable with experimenting with something new?
Is it doing the same thing but doing it more quickly, even if that’s 30 seconds quicker?
We progress and improve in so many aspects of our lives that I think it can be challenging, demotivating, and sometimes unappreciated when we focus on a specific aspect without recognizing, acknowledging or appreciating our growth in other aspects - its context in the big picture.
Furthermore, we have a tendency to want to vaguely ‘improve’.
I just want to get better.
But without precisely articulating what exactly we are aiming to get better at, we arbitrarily decide we haven’t accomplished that, that we aren’t progressing, and that we are bad at what we are trying to do.
We self-doubt, we let our insecurities and negative self-talk convince us that we are not accomplishing what we want, and we don’t take the time to acknowledge our growth.
So define what progress looks like to you.
Define Specifically What You Want To Improve.
Obviously we aspire and shoot for the moon. Obviously we want to accomplish big things. But boil it down to what you can do and are accomplishing on a daily scale.
It can be overwhelmingly demoralizing to say, “I want to go to the moon. I want to be an astronaut.” If today, I am lazing around on my couch, not in shape, not studying, and not applying myself then it can appear like an impossible goal.
But, if we break that overarching goal into the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly accomplishments that can help us to get to that point, it can become a more bite-sized and systematic way to manage our expectations, stay motivated, keep ourselves accountable, and progress daily.
Sure, becoming an astronaut in 1 day is an impossible task, but over the course of 10,15, 20 years, that is a much more realistic goal if you are progressing towards that overarching goal daily.
Perspective Matters.
Our curated digital lives are poor representations of our progress.
They are snippets. They are best takes.
In music production, to get the best mash of vocal takes, this is called ‘vocal comping’ and Billy Eillish explains it here. Her production quality sound is a compilation of her best takes.
In the instagram, social media curated digital world, you don’t know how many takes and how many photos have been taken.
In the YouTube Trickshot world, curated edited video production produces a video clip of the most impossible shots.
It creates an unrealistic expectation of ease, skill, and precision that is not actually true. Because, you are only seeing the single take of when it ended successful.
If we don’t get the shot in one shot immediately, is that a lack of progress?
This unrealistic curated view though makes people think that these are masterly precise ‘first try’ attempts. They belittle or overlook the hours of attempts and although people recognize that it took multiple attempts, I think people underappreciate the persistent effort required.
Progress Is Personal.
The other thing that I think is important to recognize about progress, is that progress is a personal thing. It is something that is uniquely your own experience, relative to your own experience, and defined by your own experience.
You cannot compare yourself to others and expect the progression to be the exact same as someone else.
You cannot apply the same progression of others on your own journey because your experiences, your perspective, your motivations, and your goals are not the same.
So it’s important to remind yourself about that fact.
None of this is mind-blowing but it is important to clarify for your intention, your expectation and your goal.
You don’t expect yourself to perform like a professional athlete within a year.
You cannot expect yourself to perform in basketball the way that Michael Jordan, Lebron James, or Kobe Bryant do.
You cannot expect yourself to sing like Adele, Beyonce, Ed Sheeran, or Whitney Houston.
You cannot expect yourself to run like Usain Bolt or Andre De Grasse.
But for some reason our minds qualify this expectation differently when it comes to anything but physical feats.
When it is something physical like basketball and running, you can see the physique that is required.
When it isn’t necessarily something physical, the eye-test is more challenging.
You cannot physically see the experience, the indicators, the skill, the charisma.
So the difference in experience, skill, charisma, leadership, decisiveness and everything else is obscured during the eye-test.
It can therefore either be extremely daunting and overwhelming or delusional to then claim to want to be as productive, as business-savvy, and as successful as Steve Jobs, Tim Ferriss, Cal Newport, Ryan Holiday, and Gary Vaynerchuk.
What you can do, however, is to design your life intentionally to create daily, weekly, monthly and year goals towards that aspiration and track your progress relative to yourself.