Do you have montage moments? That’s a moment when you feel like, if this were a movie, this would be the first shot in a montage that would fast-forward through a time transition.
Once you start to build a habit, it’s easy to expect the results will start to appear automatically. I think we’re conditioned by all of these movie montages to expect the change to happen quickly.
In truth, the montage exists because the reality is boring. It’s doing the same habit again, and again, and again, and again, and again…with only small results for a long time. The results build up through repetition and time, so you might wish for a montage.
Montages only happen in movies, and in retrospect.
When you look back at the skill that you have built, it will appear like a montage – you’ll see highlights, and it will compress in time in your memory. But when you look forward, don’t expect time to speed up for you.
It takes time to build a new skill. Lots and lots of time. Montages help fit this development into the confines of a film, but they leave us lacking perspective when we go to develop our own skills.
Tell your students: movie montages are lying to you.