Thoughts on: Perspective regarding progress

Marcos Espinosa
2 min readJul 27, 2017

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Original photo by Jeremy Perkins

Sometimes it feels like the place where we are at the moment kind of sucks. At the same moment it is the place we wished to be at at some previous point in our lives. It may not be 100% how we thought it would be, but we wished for it nonetheless.

Maybe we’re pursuing a dream. We set ourselves on a mission to get to where we want to. The first step is making the decision. As I’ve written before here, saying yes to something means saying no to something else. Which means that saying yes to following a dream might have meant saying no to comfortable things we had before.

So now we’re following our dream, but we’re not where we thought we’d be. We feel like we’re not even close. And to make matters worse, some days we don’t even know what to do. At the same time we see people advancing in their careers, with their life. Since we’re not where we thought we’d be, we feel that we haven’t advanced at all.

In the moment it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, but not all is bad. In fact, it’s probably good, but the whole thing is harder than we thought it would be.

Maybe we feel like we haven’t made any progress, but if we objectively look back one year or a couple we see a clear difference in our abilities. Maybe we still don’t have our multi-billion dollar company, but we’ve still learned valuable lessons and had small victories. Maybe we’re struggling, but if given the chance, we’d probably choose the same route again, because the thought of settling for something we didn’t want would haunt us for God knows how long.

Progress is hard to see without perspective. Things make sense when seen in relation to other things.

Anyway, this wasn’t exactly what I was planning on writing initially, it kind of happened. What are your thoughts? Let me know!

The comic for this thought is here!

-Marcos

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