Progress: Part One

Sometimes I write because it helps me think through something.

Especially something I'm somewhat stuck on.

This is one of those times.

Let's start with the puzzle.

Imagine that I asked you to draw a chart to illustrate the idea of progress.

You can have time across the horizontal axis and amount of progress made across the vertical axis.

Take a moment and really imagine what your chart would look like.

I'm talking about progress in its most universal form, not within a specific field.

If I had to guess, your chart does not look like a straight line that starts in the bottom left-corner and ends in the top-right corner.

It probably looks a bit more like this:

As you can see—and perhaps as you imagined—the chart does trend up and to the right, but along the way, there are several peaks and valleys.

Maybe yours had loops and curves.

Either way, I think it's a lot easier to draw this chart than it is to live this chart.

So here's the puzzle:

How do we accept the reality of progress?

The path of progress is riddled with plateaus and setbacks.

In this and the next two posts, I want to explore various elements of progress with the ultimate goal of trying to solve the puzzle.

***

To start, I want to share a realization I had recently.

As I was faced with this puzzle, I began to ask myself where my understanding of progress comes from.

More specifically, my understanding of how much time progress takes. Where does that come from?

While I didn't go far back in time, I was able to look at more recent sources, and I found something telling.

I've written before about how I sometimes find myself in a YouTube hole. A deep, dark one.

I could give plenty of examples here, but I'm going to pick just one.

I have probably watched every single Jamie Oliver cooking video available on YouTube.

Let's take one I watched recently: How to Make a Chicken Burger.

This video is 9 minutes and 43 seconds long.

I have never made a chicken burger in 9 minutes and 43 seconds.

I could repeat this same truth for every single Jamie Oliver video.

YouTube warps my sense of progress.

Specifically, it tricks me into believing that progress should take much less time than it actually does.

I want to start a YouTube channel called, "Real Time Things."

The videos would be hours long and absolutely no one would watch them.

True progress is boring.

I think this is the first step to solving our puzzle.