Progress is relative
Imagine you’re in a boxing gym and everyone is way better than you. You start to train consistently but don’t seem to see much progress. Everyone is still better than you. This is so because while you’re training consistently, so is everyone else.
In theory, every person in that gym is progressing because everybody trains at similar times and days. You start to think to yourself, I’ve been training so much but I’m not making that much progress. If you were making progress, it’d be evident when you spar. You’ll be able to not get beat up as much if you were getting better.
It’s not until you get to spar with people who don’t train or go to another gym that’s less skilled that you discover that you’re making progress. That’s because progress is relative to the environment you’re in. In fact, I’d argued for being in a tough environment to develop resiliency and skillset because when you step outside of your bubble, you’ll clearly see the difference.
It’s frustrating at first
Confidence is a big factor in not only how we perceive ourselves but how we take action as well. There are some people that excel in practice but when the big lights are on and more people are watching, they don’t perform like they usually do.
Thoughts of imposter syndrome, self-doubts, and external concerns start clouding the mind and every action you take will be full of hesitation.
During High school, our basketball coach will have our players jeer and yell stuff at our starters during practice. He wanted to imitate real-life scenarios and conditions so everyone would get used to them. It looked miserable to be yelled at—especially slurs and profanity as a high school athlete. But the more the athletes got exposed to it, the easier it was to concentrate when it came time for actual games.
There’s a concept I’d argued that most of us should try, the “not-as-bad” concept. The goal is to put yourself through a terrible experience so anything else that happens can be compared. This gives you the justification that anything lesser than a terrible experience is a walk in the park. Even if it sucks, you can tell yourself “At least, it wasn’t as bad as that one time”.
You’re essentially pushing the threshold of what you can tolerate. It doesn’t have to be extremely difficult from the beginning as you can slowly build up tolerance. Similar to lifting weights and how you start at a lower weight and then work your way up to heavy. If you go heavy from the start, you’ll end up hurting yourself.
The beginning part is frustrating because you’re not used to friction or difficulty. Everything is telling you to stop because of the uncomfortableness. You must ignore this instinct and learn to revel in it. Once you’ve established uncomfortableness as the norm, it’s time to ramp it up.
If you’re used to talking to 20 people in the crowd, would 10 people make you nervous? You’ll probably get more confident since there are fewer people there. You might even open up your body language and speak with more authority. If you can continue to talk to an even bigger crowd, 20 people will be a walk in the park.
Go outside your environment
We get discouraged when progress isn’t visible or clear. The reason is I’ve put in all of this work but yet have nothing to show for it. The first thing is to realize that while hard work is important, in no way does it grant you the belief that you’re great. Second, people learn at a different rate, and while it’s unfair (to you), some people simply get better with less time. Third, it might be worthwhile to go outside of your environment to not only measure progress but to gather new information and ideas.
The latter is important because you won’t realize how much you’ve grown until you’ve gone outside of the norm.
When you and everyone else are in the same bubble, as you get better so does everyone else. Everyone learns pretty much the same thing—all of the concepts, weaknesses, and strengths. Back to the boxing example, if everyone is aware of how to move and strike, it’s way harder to be successful. But once you go outside of your bubble, you can now implement movement and strategy for people who aren’t as adept and knowledgeable. Suddenly, things that don’t work in your gym, now work.
It’s not because everyone else outside the bubble is worse, it’s because they’re not aware of your style of boxing. Perhaps over time, they’ll get adjusted but only then you get to see the progress you’ve made.
You’ll also get to see if your style is inferior to others or what weaknesses your style presents. Cross-training with other people and styles is a tremendous advantage that you can implement periodically to test yourself.
Since everyone has their own style, you can take pieces of what works well and implement them into your own. If you’re always in your bubble, you’ll never know what else is efficient and successful.
Do a bit more
The one thing you can do to see even more progress in your bubble is to do slightly a bit more than others. Then can take various forms—studying, practicing, reading, asking more questions, taking more risks, etc.
If you’re trying to catch up to people who have been practicing longer than you are, the traditional methods—just working when everyone else is working, will not be enough. They just have too many hours on you if you just work the standard hours.
You have to trust the power of compound interest and let all of the extra work accumulate. There’s no other way around it, you’ll have to spend more time learning and doing outside of standard hours in order to catch up and eventually surpass them. I’d argued this is where ego is needed in order to pursue improvement.
It’s not a big or surprising fact that you need to do more in order to get better. If you go at the same rate as others, don’t expect to get better noticeably. The more you know, the more you start to think about things differently.
That’s a crucial detail to not only creating your own style but also allowing you to deviate from the norm. If you’re learning what everyone else is learning, that’s the norm, and hard to see progress because everyone knows the same thing. But if you have your own style, you can now react or do things slightly different enough that it’s still successful but through your means.
My friend has a unique way of folding shirts that allows her to fold a shirt in 3 seconds. When she worked at a retailer, everybody learned the standard way which took around 10 seconds. She noticed that she could bypass a few steps by holding the shirts a certain way and also get the same result much quicker. She could now fold 3 shirts at the same time as another employee could fold 1. She noted that it was important to learn the 10-second method because it taught her basic concepts, and then she took that and experimented with ways to make it quicker. She held it from all different angles and Google different ways people folded shirts and eventually created her own method.
A curious mind is needed to ponder about making things better and to assess the current methodology of doing things. Not only do you have to do more than others, it’s also advantageous to think about it a bit more.
Even with all of this, it still takes time to see progress. Enjoy the journey and embrace the suck… for now.
*Check out my last article on Don’t think in absolutes*
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