Your Greatest Successes May Come After the Plateau
Success isn’t linear
Every year around this time, the same piece of motivation makes the rounds: If you want to do something new and you practice it regularly, you’ll get a little bit better each time. You may have heard of it as the “1% rule” — the idea that continuously improving by just 1% makes a dramatic difference over time.
It sounds great. For anything you’re attempting, the promise of steady, incremental improvement can be a powerful incentive. But it’s also often unrealistic, especially if you are already skilled to begin with. For example, try telling someone who currently deadlifts 500 pounds or writes prizewinning fiction or develops impeccable code that they should be getting a percent or two better every single day. Not gonna happen.
A more accurate description of progress looks something like this:
When you are brand new to an activity, you might get significantly better every day. For the first few times, you may even get 100% better. As your skill level increases, the gains will become more incremental — 10%, 5%, 1%, half a percent, a quarter of a percent, and so on. At some point, the gains will be so small that you can’t even observe them. You might find yourself feeling stuck on a plateau for a few days, weeks, or months.
