Invisible Progress

There’s a peculiar cruelty to the way progress actually works. We imagine it should feel like something, like we should be able to sense the accumulation of our efforts the way we can feel water filling a bathtub. But progress is almost never like that. It’s more like watching a plant grow, checking it obsessively every morning and seeing exactly what you saw yesterday, until one day you look up and realize it’s somehow doubled in height when you weren’t paying attention.I think about this every time someone asks me how my writing is going, or how I’m doing with learning Spanish, or whether I’ve gotten better at cooking. The honest answer is always: I have no idea. I’m too close to see it. I’m inside the gradual transformation, and from inside, everything looks static.The problem is that progress doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t send you a notification when you’ve gotten five percent better at something. Instead, it disguises itself as the mundane repetition of days. You show up, you do the thing, you go to bed feeling roughly the same as you did that morning. The next day repeats with minor variations. Nothing seems to be happening. This is the dark middle of any worthwhile pursuit, where most people quit because they can’t see evidence that their efforts matter.But here’s what’s actually occurring beneath that seemingly unchanging surface: your brain is rewiring itself in microscopic ways, forming new neural pathways and strengthening existing ones. Your muscles are breaking down and rebuilding stronger. Your intuition is cataloging thousands of tiny pattern recognitions that you’re not consciously aware of. The gap between your current ability and your potential ability is narrowing by fractions of a percent that are individually imperceptible but cumulatively transformative.The mathematician who solves a proof didn’t suddenly become brilliant the night before the breakthrough. They became brilliant gradually, through years of barely noticeable improvements, until they reached some invisible threshold where the solution became possible. The writer who finally produces something worth reading didn’t transform overnight. They wrote a thousand unremarkable sentences that each taught them something they couldn’t articulate until, eventually, the good sentences started appearing without them knowing exactly why.We’re terrible at perceiving this kind of change because our minds are designed to notice contrasts and sudden shifts, not incremental drift. You don’t notice your child growing taller because you see them every day, but your sister who visits twice a year is shocked each time. You can’t hear your accent fading while you’re learning a new language, but someone who knew you before and after will immediately catch the difference. The transformation is real but requires distance to become visible.This creates a profound psychological challenge. We have to keep faith in a process we can’t actually observe working. We have to trust that showing up and doing the thing, even when it feels pointless, is building something real beneath the surface. It’s like making daily deposits into a bank account and never checking the balance, just believing that compound interest is doing its work invisibly.I’ve noticed that people who stick with difficult things long enough to get good at them all seem to share a particular trait: they’ve made peace with not being able to see their progress. They’ve learned to judge themselves not by whether they feel different today than yesterday, but by whether they’re maintaining the conditions under which progress happens. Did they show up? Did they engage honestly with the work? Did they push slightly past comfort? If yes, then progress is happening whether it feels like it or not.The alternative is to constantly measure yourself against yesterday’s version, which is a recipe for despair because yesterday’s version looks identical to today’s. It’s like trying to watch your hair grow or catching yourself getting older. The only way to see it is to look backward from a greater distance, comparing yourself not to yesterday but to six months ago, a year ago, five years ago.Sometimes I look at old journal entries or early drafts of writing and I’m genuinely surprised by how different my thinking was. Not worse, necessarily, just operating with different assumptions and capabilities. I couldn’t have told you the specific moment those changes occurred. They happened somewhere in the accumulated experience of a thousand unremarkable days. The person who wrote those entries couldn’t see the person I would become any more than I can see the person I’m becoming right now.This is both the frustration and the consolation of any meaningful pursuit. You have to tolerate long stretches where nothing seems to be happening, where you feel like an imposter or a failure, where the gap between your taste and your ability feels insurmountable. But if you can just keep showing up through that emptiness, progress is occurring in the dark. Roots are spreading underground while the surface looks barren. The architecture of expertise is being built in a dimension you can’t access while you’re inside it.The trick, if there is one, is to stop asking whether you’re making progress and start asking whether you’re creating the conditions for progress. Are you practicing regularly? Are you seeking challenge? Are you reflecting on your experience? Are you patient with yourself? These are the inputs you can control. The output, the actual transformation, happens on its own schedule according to laws you can’t fully understand or accelerate.And maybe that’s okay. Maybe there’s something appropriate about the invisibility of growth, the way it protects us from our own impatience and forces us to develop faith in process over outcome. Maybe the person you’re becoming needs to emerge slowly, in the dark, without you watching too closely. Maybe the best things that happen to us happen so gradually that we only recognize them in retrospect, when enough time has passed to reveal what was always building beneath the surface we were so anxiously monitoring.