The Learning Curve
“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.”– Pele
This is for the beginner. The ones who have just started to take the first steps and have already visualized what success would look like for them. It would be an enthusiastic start for sure. However, as you move forward you will surely start to notice that you are not making much progress. Or in some cases you will find yourself failing, again and again, restarting from the beginning each time.
This was exactly what happened to me a few years back. I doubted that I would get stuck in this infinite loop of trying, failing and retrying.
But finally, I realized something.
When I took a moment to pause and think about what really is happening to me. I found out that I wasn’t giving myself the permission to fail. Every time I fail, I would go back and start from the beginning. Even if I successfully completed one to three and failed at four, I would still start all over again from one.
This was mostly because I would take a break for a few weeks (or even a month) after each failure. As I was writing a blog, when I return, I would find out that what I am about to write doesn’t match with what I have already written. So I would delete all the older content and go for a fresh start. I got stuck in this loop for more than a year before I realized that I would inevitably have to tolerate bad content in order to keep moving forward.
Perfectionist ideals are good but too much of it will make you stuck.
Every time you start doing something new, you can't just spring out one fine morning as an expert. It will take persistent practice. So embrace the learning curve. You won’t start going up in the graph right from the first step you take in the journey, you will first encounter a dip, and only after it will the graph start to elevate.
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”– Henry Ford
The dip doesn’t show that your productivity is low. It just shows that you are taking the time to learn the craft.
If you try to avoid the dip by soaring into the creation process without taking the time to learn, you will almost certainly get trapped in that infinite loop of tying, failing and retrying.
So embrace the learning curve, it is just an opportunity to prepare yourself for what is to come.
This post first appeared on TheResonantVoice.com and was written by Niranjanan Prajith.
