Progress.
I’ve always liked that word because progress feels like I’m doing something. Something important. Something that matters. Progress means I’m going someplace good.
And making progress is fun because it’s the physical embodiment of that up-and- to-the-right graph that’s prized by researchers the world over.
But thinking about progress can also invoke fear. As a kid, I dreaded the progress report sent home by teachers every four and a half weeks. Was I “on track?” Was I “a joy to have in class?” Did I “spend too much time talking?” That report told me exactly where I stood at that exact moment in time.
So progress is good, but also scary. How much progress we’ve made has implications in a wide variety of fields. We want to see forward movement. That’s why I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when I heard Adam Grant as a guest on Hidden Brain talking about how progress sometimes means going backward.
Wait. What?
Going Back
He said that in order to progress, you need to imagine alternative realities, and sometimes that means you will have to change the way you do things. For example, he said, suppose you want to become a faster typist, but you’ve spent your whole life hunting and pecking. You can hunt and peck all you want, but you’ll never be as fast as the person who learned how to use the keyboard by memorizing the home row and going from there. When you’re introduced to this new way of typing, you’re going to be pretty slow…at first. And that’s okay. You WILL get faster because the new and improved process of learning and the system it utilizes insures a faster typing speed.
Adam said,
Progress rarely happens in a straight line. It typically unfolds in loops. Day by day, it can feel like you're spinning your wheels.
The Downside of Accountability
After a fancy dinner at The Optimist last week, I told my family I was going to “up” my cooking game. No doubt there will be many kitchen disasters on my way to gourmet chef. To be sure, every meal doesn’t have to be a culinary work of art—even though I want it to be! Trying new techniques might feel like wasting ingredients. Taste is nuanced and personal. Everyone in my family can’t be expected to like everything I make.
I used to be a part of a cohort of entrepreneurs. The people in that group proved to be great accountability partners, but our monthly meetings left me feeling pressured to report only what was going well. That wasn’t the intention, of course. My own insecurity is what kept me from being totally vulnerable about the things I tried that didn’t work. But now I know what it means to “fail forward.” What we learn through failure makes the next step possible.
If this is the year that you’ve resolved either to try something new or to get better at something you’re already doing, I hope you find the idea of going backward for a time as a bit of encouragement. I know that doing so feels like the opposite of progress, but when you approach the experience with curiosity about what you can learn through the process, the pain of going backwards feels a little more bearable.
The Science Behind the Theory
I want to leave you with this final thought, and it’s a scientific principle that we can apply to life. A lot of people think speed and velocity are the same thing. The reality is that speed is how fast you’re going, but velocity is how fast you’re going in a specific direction. Adam Grant said that progress can feel like spinning your wheels, and it can if you’re not paying attention to direction.
We all want progress. But..if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.—CS Lewis
Keep going, my friend. Just remember that going backwards might be just the direction you need to take right now.