Why Your Progress Rate Decreases Over Time

And why this is no cause for concern

When we start a new career or train a new skill, the beginning is usually tricky and frustrating. Our brain does not yet have any neural networks to which we can connect our new knowledge, and we also lack the network for progress in our career.

But after the unavoidable initial difficulties, things finally become more effortless. Anyone who struggles through the challenging initial period is suddenly rewarded with rapid progress.

When the time comes that you suddenly make faster progress in your career or you can suddenly form complicated sentences in a new language, you will be euphoric. When you start a new business, you will quickly see a doubling of your previous turnover, and as a blogger, your traffic will multiply.

This, of course, builds up expectations for the future. You can’t help but project your past progress into the future. You think that you can continue to double your revenue or followers, or skills at the same pace as before, and you are making a dangerous mistake.

The bitter truth is that your initial pace of progress will soon slow down considerably. You must realize that your assumptions about your bright future are not valid. You won’t be a millionaire or CEO in a year, even if your progress so far has made it look that way.

Most people don’t consider a straightforward fact: small numbers are easier to double than large numbers.

As a blog author, it can take a long time to earn your first dollar within a month. But once you do, you’ll quickly have a month in which you make two, and next, you’ll have ten dollars in a month. Of course, you then think that you can expect at least a monthly doubling in the future. You are modest and don’t expect a fivefold increase, like between month two and three.

But doubling is exponential. In fact, if it were to happen, fourteen months after you had your first month with two dollars, you would have to earn well over 30,000 dollars a month. That this will most likely not happen, you should know. Not that you can’t earn that amount by blogging, but certainly not in under two years.

Let’s stay with the example of blogging. To grow your income exponentially, you would have to increase your traffic exponentially first. But how much traffic you get depends on many factors. How much content have you already produced? How high quality is this content? How well known are you, and how well connected are you? These are all factors that you cannot increase exponentially.

For this reason, the initial, apparent exponential growth will soon turn into a very flat increase. It can’t be any different.

If you learn a new language, you will have a very similar situation. You will find that the level of complexity increases as you progress. Soon it will not be enough to learn a simple grammar rule to multiply your ability to express yourself. You need to go much deeper into the structure of the language to make the next big leap.

So no matter what area you want to improve in, it will always follow this pattern. It’s incredibly frustrating in the beginning. Then suddenly, everything seems to go by itself, and finally, it feels like someone has tied an iron ball to your leg.

It is essential to know this pattern from the beginning and to expect it. This will help you through your ambitious project’s hard times and save you a lot of frustration and sleepless nights.

You need to know that this is what happens to everyone who tries something new and that it is not a failure on your part if your progress comes to a virtual standstill after some time. All this is in the nature of things and must not discourage you.

Whoever knows the obstacles on the way to success can accept them calmly and still reach the goal.

I hope this article will help you to stay calm and continue to believe in yourself as you reach this point in your new project.

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