Imperceptible Progress
Nineteen years into her writing career, Helen Garner stumbled across something she’d written long, long ago. It was, to her, noticeably bad writing. But she could still remember working on the piece all those years ago, and at the time, in the moment, she didn’t think that what she was writing was bad. It was the best that the younger, less practiced writer was capable of. “This thought made me quite cheerful,” Garner writes in her journals. She had been working away for nearly two decades, never really feeling like she was improving all that much. Here she was seeing that, in fact, “I had imperceptibly, over years, and not by the exercise of will,” made enormous progress.
Imperceptible progress—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Importance Of Tracking Your Efforts
Since 2005, the rock climber Alex Honnold has kept a “training journal,” recording all of his climbs, workouts, and day-to-day tasks. The entries are usually brief and nonchalant. From the day he became the first person in twenty years to free solo (climbing without ropes or anything) two particular walls in Yosemite, for example: “9/19/07 — Astroman — 5.11c [the climb’s difficulty rating] — solo. Rostrum — 5.11c — solo.” Or, the day before he became the first ever to free solo the 3,000-ft El Capitan: “6/2/17 — hiked Sierra Point w/ Mom & Frenchies. Stroll!” Anyways, Honnold has kept up this journaling practice “because I think it’s important to keep track of your efforts,” he said. “With any kind of process, the progress is so gradual. Basically, you’re always trying just as hard as you were the day before, but your numbers only start to improve after months or years. And so if you don’t have it written down, you feel like you’re not improving. But if you’re taking notes in a notebook or something, when you look back, you’re like, “Oh, I’m actually lifting twice as much weight as I was when I started,” and then you’re like, ‘That’s pretty satisfying.’”
That Was The Rope Bridge You Had To Cross
Back when the internet was just becoming mainstream, Jerry Seinfeld went though his stand-up sets and TV appearances, pulling clips to put on his website. “So I had to watch everything I’ve ever done,” he said to a fellow comedian. “I spent months. I did it chronologically. And I got to watch myself—I went, ‘Oh, look, he’s learning. Look, he’s getting better at talking. Look at how he’s standing now—he’s not so uncomfortable.’ It was cool to watch. It was cool to watch.” “Yeah,” the fellow comedian replied, “as long as you’re not too hard on yourself. It’s so easy to look back, and be like, ‘Oh, what are you doing?’” “No,” Seinfeld said, “you can never, ever be like that. Never. Because that got you here. That got you here. You have to look back, and go, ‘That was bad, but that was the rope bridge that I had to cross. I had to cross that rope bridge to get where I am now.’”
Making Life Better For The Person In The Third Chair
Years after he’d last been there, Henrik Karlsson stopped by the public library where he used to spend countless hours alone, struggling to write, wrestling with the seemingly impossible dream of becoming a writer. Approaching the chair he used to sit in, Karlsson writes, “The sensation that he, my previous self, was still sitting there was so strong that I pulled out the chair next to it.” As he sat down in that second chair, feelings of loneliness, doubt, and despair—what his younger self felt each time he returned to that chair to write—suddenly resurfaced. Now a successful writer, as Karlsson looked at that struggling version of himself who endured those feelings and kept at it, “I felt a deep gratitude to him,” he writes, “for all he has given me, all the experiences and friendships that make my life better than his, and which his willingness to persevere brought into existence. ‘If you only knew,’ I said out loud in the empty library, ‘how thankful I am for what you have done.’” Then he looked around, “and noticed, behind me—a third chair.” Though he couldn’t go back to express his gratitude to his past self, he could commit to paying it forward to the person sitting in the third chair: his future self. “It’s the commitment to embracing a little discomfort, a little short-term pain, in pushing my limits and staring at my flaws,” Karlsson explained. “By putting a few of my hours every week into doing that, I’m giving a gift to my future self. Because if I’m able to overcome this limitation or that flaw, some future version of me will bear the fruit of that…It could be small things too—I can clean the dishes tonight so that tomorrow-Henrik doesn’t have a terrible morning. So with small things and big things, it can be quite useful to visualize your future self and then ask, ‘What kinds of things would make their life better?’” The answer usually involves your present self persisting at things that, on any given day, make almost no perceptible difference.
Suspend Judgment
Something that helps me persist through the day-to-day frustrations of putting in effort with no visible payoff—I keep a notecard on my desk that says, “Suspend Judgment.” As in, hold off on deciding whether any given bout of effort is paying off or making a difference. I, for example, routinely spend days reading a thick biography, looking for material for myself or others to use in their writing. Often, I come up empty—reading hundreds of pages without finding a single story, idea, or quote that feels compelling, resonant, or relevant. But then, it happens all the time: weeks or months later, I’ll be reading something else, and something in it will suddenly make a story, idea, or quote from that earlier biography feel compelling, resonant, or relevant. So eventually, I started to suspend judgment—not just with books, but tasks and to-dos in general—leaving my sense of what I’ve gotten out of my efforts up in the air, awaiting more context, information, or time. Because the effects of effort tend to reveal themselves imperceptibly, over weeks, months, or years.
Transforming The Wilderness
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes, “the same task, performed year in and year out, will eventually transform the wilderness into cultivated land.” You just have to keep at it, day in and day out, knowing that one day you’ll look back and see that you’ve made enormous progress—imperceptibly, over years.