We react to sudden changes. Sudden changes can be traumatic, but they are highly visible to us, so we react appropriately. We prioritize that reaction, we make the adjustments we need to make, and we keep moving forward.
Problem is, much change happens too slowly. I’m thinking about things like personal growth, skill development, community enhancement.
These changes happen sloooooooooowly. Weeks, months, years, even decades to see tangible differences.
In the face of these changes being invisible, most of us quit. We quit before the exercise regimen starts to work, before the piano lessons really kick in, before we’ve really found our place in a professional community.
We quit not because it’s not working, but because it’s happening too slowly to see, and we get discouraged because we can’t see it.
This will always be a problem. It is exacerbated, though, by a primary and secondary education system that breaks schoolwork into discrete segments that are quickly completed. We so rarely spend time on a project with a long enough timespan for us to get a sense of what slow change feels like.
Making an album takes months or years of work. What precedent is there for it in a teenager’s life experience? Daily math assignments that are completed, turned in, and discarded do not give the same arc.
If we want to achieve, and if we want our kids to achieve, we need to give them more big projects to tackle over time. Let them feel what it feels like to make such incremental progress that it’s invisible to the naked eye.
Get used to that feeling, and you’ll be ready for a lifetime of undertaking interesting projects and seeing them to completion.