Movies can be very inspiring. Rocky. Apollo 13. Hoosiers. Stand and Deliver. Remember the Titans. Seeing people overcome adversity and achieve their dreams through hard work and determination. But there’s an aspect of that that can be really misleading. For the sake of telling the story, in the movies we usually see someone’s growth from fumbling amateur to consummate professional take place in a 5 minute montage of scenes, or maybe in 20–30 minutes of plot development. And then we can get a real misconception of how things work.
In our society, we place a great emphasis on speed. We like fast food, overnight delivery and instant gratification. We’ve also come to expect instant transformation as well. Which is great, except for the fact that it usually doesn’t work that way. An internal transformation, a shift in our way of thinking and seeing the world, can take place in an instant, but the development of skills and abilities and talents and the accomplishment of results in the outer world often takes a lot longer. When we watch Rocky, we get a sense that he worked hard to succeed as a boxer, but it’s still hard to realize how many hours he put in, with no apparent progress, and how lonely that felt.
In learning any skill, there’s a continuous scale from 0 to 10. All of us start at zero. Not everyone ends up at 10. We might think that through sheer willpower we can jump from a 3 to a 7 on the scale, or even go from 1 to 10. The reality is, no one skips a step moving along this scale. It is possible to move up quickly, but it’s a continuous progression from 0 to 1, 1 to 2, 2 to 3, etc., and eventually from 9 to 10. At different places along the scale we learn different things, and have different challenges to overcome.
Thinking that I should be somewhere on the scale that I’m not can be very discouraging. The truth is, different people progress at different rates. I can generally make much faster progress with a good coach than I can on my own, but it’s still going to take some time. The important thing is to stay on the path. Whether it takes me 6 months or 6 years, the path to mastery is a walkable one as long as I keep making forward progress.
You can’t skip your own evolution.
Steve Johnsen is a marketing strategist, a business coach, and the Founder of Cloud Mountain Marketing. He is also the author of the Amazon #1 best-seller, 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee.
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