Arrache-moi la tête

Learning is not a linear process. You go through stages. Very much like in a video game, each stage offers new challenges to you. Those challenges allow you to reuse past tricks you’ve learnt from the previous stage, but also force you to discover new tricks.

Understanding that mechanism helps you not feel discouraged when the progress starts to slow down after an exhilirating period of accelerated learning. It helps, because it gives you the ability to recognize the end of a stage and to accept that what led you there won’t be enough to take you further.

The deceleration of progress should be interpreted as an opportunity to observe what the next stage looks like, assess what the new challenges are going to be, and come up with a plan. It’s also the right moment to acknowledge the progress made in the current stage – if the feeling of progressing has slowed down, it must be because you’ve acquired skills you didn’t have before.