The Fallacy of Linear Progress - (Rant Slab)
Countless times in my life I have found myself beating myself the fuck up because I’m not exactly where I thought I would be at this very moment, because I’m not matching up with my ego’s grand projection of itself. It’s taken way longer than I’d like to admit to realize that this is a thoroughly unhelpful behaviour and that ultimately above all else, the concept of progress as linear is a total fallacy.
When we start out working towards a goal, many of us will picture a schedule of work, steadily chugging along towards completion within a pre-determined time frame. Of course, it almost never works out this way. Pitfalls come along, unexpected wrenches get thrown into our timelines, and ultimately goals are rewritten. And this is TOTALLY OKAY AND NORMAL. I can’t count how many times I’ve talked to people who get bogged down into the mental trench of “I’m just so bad at anticipating things, no one else struggles like this, why can’t I just be efficient and get this done like everyone else!?!?”. Well it’s because you’re a god damn human-shaped meat sack I tell you what, and that’s okay, progress is not linear.
To really develop a mindful perspective on our own goals and aspirations, we need to be fully aware that progress is never going to feel like a steady climb upwards. We also need to continually keep the past in perspective, especially when learning a new skill. I teach a lot of students music who are constantly pushing the edge of their playing ability, which is awesome for improvement, but psychologically it can be difficult to become aware of how much you have actually gotten better. It’s always important to take little looks backwards at where you were a week, month, or year ago to gain some perspective. One of our innate psychological quirks is that we are always focussing on the next goal without remembering where we came from! This may be efficient for evolutionary survival, but it certainly can take a toll on our minds in a modern context.
We also need to remember that while working on things, especially creative projects, we’re going to try a lot of things that won’t make it into the final project, but that this is part of the work! Figuring out what doesn’t work is as much of a practice of honing our intuitions as discovering something amazing.
So next time you have something unexpected knock a project off of it’s timeline, LOVE IT. Learn to observe the frantically erratic arrow of your progress, but god damnit keep grinding ya hear!
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Ben Levin was the first person to tell me that no matter how shitty you feel about your skills that day, if you look back a year, you will feel great. And it's only when the one year view gets shitty that you need to panic.
It's a good idea, although these days I think maybe quarterly self-measuring (i.e. how much have I improved in 3 months?) might be a lil more of a "fire under the ass" way to look at it
I often find that I progress in bursts of productive work. I realise when reading your post that I do have this ideal of steady progress, which never really tend to happen. Glad you reminded me this is not to be expected, and that I should also see where I come from. Two very useful pieces of advice, thank you!
I certainly do good work in bursts too! It seems like we all have such variable work and "progress" styles that trying to fit yourself into one mold is deeply counter productive! So happy this post helped in whatever small way!