Linear Progress is a Lie
Happy midweek to all!
I’m in the midst of another round of edits for Ylmi’s Saga, which is nearing completion and I am loving it more every day. It is over twice as long as Karik’s First Battle at the moment, and as I’m working on it, I had some thoughts about progress and the way we measure it.
When I started lifting, I had the idea that every week I’d hit a new personal best. If I was disciplined, used the right training program, and worked hard, I’d see steady improvement.
And the big problem was that I did! When I started off, I was hitting a new record every week, by almost every measurable I was getting better ever single time I got in the gym.
So when life happened, and I couldn’t hit the gym as much, I told myself it was okay, I had other stuff going on. But then life kept happening, and even when I got back to the gym, my numbers plateaued, and my motivation plummeted. I stopped progressing as fast, and that meant I was doing something wrong.
Well…not really. When we begin learning new skills, we quickly eat up the ‘easy’ progress. Simply by doing something you often get better at it, to a point. But from that point on it takes a ton of work to make even the smallest progress, and that progress comes in waves.
That’s the part that got me for the longest time, the cyclical nature of progress. Ask any lifting coach and they’ll tell you that lifting lighter weights to focus on form is one of the best things you can do for your improvement.
There are similar principles in writing, where we often measure our progress in word counts or pages written. It feels bad to cut a thousand words or delete four pages of hard written work, but it is necessary to craft a great story.
Sometimes we have to go backwards and fix something, either poor form or a scene…because unless you’re in a word sprint or a lifting meet, the numbers aren’t the goal. The goal is to build something better. And at the end of the day, we aren’t building a lego tower, we are trying to bring order out of chaos. Some days, chaos is weak, and we are able to create a lot of order. Some days, chaos is almost infinite and all the order we create gets overwhelmed…but we have still decreased the amount of chaos from what it would otherwise have been.
Progress in the end looks a lot more like consistency than anything else. Tiny routines and improvements performed daily add up. They aren’t fun because they don’t look particularly fun on Instagram or in our journal, but after six months or a year, their compounded effects leave us far beyond where we expected to be.
But at the end of the day, I’m only one person living one life…despite my best efforts to live a hundred others vicariously through fiction. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What have been some of the things that you’ve learned through your life as you navigate our crazy world?
