Why Progress Often Frustrates Us (And What To Do About It)
Decrypting our amazement when too small and too slowly to notice becomes too big and too fast to wrap our heads around.
Few things have the ability to confound and frustrate us like how progress happens. This is mostly because progress often takes a trajectory similar to something else we also find very difficult to wrap our heads around:
Exponential growth.
Progress, almost as a rule, never happens linearly, it mostly follows an exponential growth curve where initially, it happens too slowly and too small to notice, and then when compounding is allowed to do its magic, things happens so fast and so big in way that completely beats our imagination.
The thing is, we find linear thinking much more easier to wrap our heads around than exponential thinking. We intuitively get how 5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5 becomes 40, but we get stumbled that the same number of 5’s multiplied together is big as 390,625. We get confused by exponential growth which often makes us under-appreciate how powerful it is. We therefore miss a crucial understanding of how big things become big.
As physicist Albert Bartlett puts it:
“The greatest shortcoming of the human…
