Why real progress takes time
In this day and age, social media is closer to us than ever before. Like the 7–11 stores in Macau, it is barely a stone’s throw away from anywhere you go in the country. And like the wardrobe you enter to go into Aslan’s country in the Chronicles of Narnia, it opens up a portal to a different world, one where you do not come into contact with in your daily life.
Going through these platforms, one can easily find dozens of inspirational content and people on it. They echo new possibilities for what you can do with your time, money, cooking, or even parts of your body — eyes, face, lips, eyebrows, hair or feet. They are distant landmarks calling out to us when we feel directionless or when we need a boost of motivation in life.
Despite the boost of whatever hormone it provides, they often rarely tell the full picture. There isn’t a series of posts that tells of how much time, energy, money and opportunity costs forgone to achieve what you see in that one photo. It does not showcase the inner work — the lessons undergone, the people they had to talk to, the time spent ruminating over what had been shared, the doubts faced and the money forked to get everything in that moment of time. Like a completed painting or a well-made up look, it presents possibility, beauty and what we can be one day. But if one is thirsty and in the middle of the desert, the after effects of it will feel like a mirage. The well is there, but it is a lot further than one would had expected.
The truth is, real progress takes time. But time itself does not guarantee progress, just like how time itself does not guarantee healing. It takes small and consistent effort, learning from mistakes, that through time, births into real results. In time it will show. Just like how someone who is interested in a goal of having better skin care, in five years, might have better skin than someone who isn’t. This is because the one who is interested would be open to learning about their skin condition. They would be open to getting it checked by a professional dermatologist or the National Skin Center. The one who is committed would hear something relevant on the radio or podcast, read a book, post, article, video and check up or ask more questions about it, because it was something they thought of for a very long time. They would do things that someone who isn’t interested in would normally not think of or spend energy trying to solve.
Real progress is like a by-product of a journey you had set out toward. You might start with a goal and 1 question and end up with a few smaller goals and perhaps 10 more questions. As with the nature of any journey in life, there would also be ups and downs. You might spend a lot of money on one product that didn’t work and because of it find 5 more products that are affordable and work amazingly well.
This is also accurately true for any type of journey, even in one’s career or artistic journey. James Cameron, a prolific director of many famous movies including Avatar and the Terminator series, captured the essence of progress well when he said this in a reply on some of his favourite failures as a director.
“I had produced films that didn’t do well. But the film I would consider a failure because it wasn’t a hit, it was sort of a breakeven project, it was .. considered one of the most expensive film ever made in its time…was the Abyss, which was released in 1989.
….
I couldn’t have made Titanic, and Titanic wouldn’t had been a hit if I had not done the Abyss. On Titanic I kept the Abyss in mind and I shaped it to have the maximum emotional orchestration to the end of the film and to keep the visual effects in check so they always serve the storyline…the narrative.. the characters. It took the Abyss failing for Titanic to be the [artistic] success that it was.”
Photo by Samuel Myles on Unsplash
