Quiet Progress And Fireworks
Sometimes, your whole life changes because of an idea.
Incremental progress is one of those ideas for me.
The maths of "slow and steady" never quite added up for me before I hit my late twenties. I don't know if it is because someone explained it better or because I unlocked "long-term-vision". When I got it, I REALLY got it, though.
Before then, I had an incredibly hard time with persistence. I think it was partially because I had no timeframe for when work was supposed to pay off.
It is really hard to have an idea of what you can accomplish in five or ten years when you are only twenty years old. You have not even been "grown-up all that long". Your concept of five years puts you back at fifteen, which may as well have been a different planet. Things change so quickly at that age.
This is something that definitely got easier when I hit my thirties. I now have an idea of what ten years as a "grown-up" look like.
Another problem with long-term vision comes from the way school teaches us. Or doesn't teach us, as it were.
In school, you have to learn things when you have to learn them, jump through a couple of hoops when you have to jump, and if you get it right, great. But if you don't get it right, you just move on and focus on the next hoop, hoping that what you missed doesn't catch up to you.
Life works very differently.
Eventually, we all run into the hurdle we can not jump on the first try. We arrive at what we think is an easy thing and find out that not only can we not do it the first time around, we can not do it the tenth time around either.
Progress at this stage still happens, but it is too small to be visible. I still do not notice any meaningful progress in my life from one day to the next, even though I have become very good at noticing things.
If anything, sometimes I feel like I make a step back. My voice will be great for a week, and then I have a day where I can barely carry a note. I'll stay very organized and eat healthy for a month and then have fries three days in a row and forget about the laundry.
The big picture does not show up in the small stuff that makes our days. That's why it is called the big picture.
And yet, when I listen to recordings of my voice a year ago, I can hear that I am much better now. Even a couple of months back, I had much more difficulties around the edges of my vocal range than today.
Similarly, I may still have days where things are chaotic, but the ratio of organized to chaotic days has improved a lot. I am a lot healthier than I was five years ago, I eat and sleep better, and I exercise more.
All of this happened quietly.
At least for the most part.
Sometimes, progress still arrives with a big bang which is very gratifying.
There are moments where all your tiny steps reach critical mass and flow together in a big, beautiful wave of awesome.
Last week, for example, my vocal range suddenly extended by a couple of notes on either end. From one day to the next, I could easily sing everything I found difficult during the last few weeks of recording. It's like a door in my throat popped open.
These "big upgrades" often come after an intense period of training for me.
Recording vocals for Niovel's first album is intense. I've been practising my singing much more often and with a much more specific focus than before. Eventually, it just clicked. Also, we just received the mastered version of our first song and I am still completely flashed. It sounds like real music!
I had a similar experience with writing two years ago after I finished NaNoWriMo—a challenge to write a book in 30 days. After making it through that, I never struggled with "what to write" again.
So yes, incrementalism changed my perspective on practising a skill, but I still appreciate the odd firework here and there.
There's nothing quite like a real-life level up with confetti and everything.
