Ugly progress
The case for believing that you’re getting somewhere, even when you’re not.
The other day, I woke up in the dark and arrived at my office before 5 AM.
I painstakingly set up my equipment — lights, camera, mic — and spent an hour recording video.
Well, that’s all that I recorded. Because after transferring the files to my computer, I realized that they were all silent.
There is a lot that is as frustrating as this. But there’s nothing more frustrating than a precious hour, wasted.
Hours are especially precious to me right now because I’m trying to have a career while also being a mother. Not only do I try to work while my children are sleeping, I also work when I should be sleeping. And discovering that the sacrifice of sleep was for nothing was quite a blow to the gut.
The good news is that I have become very good at rationalizing such disappointments. Because the fact is, even though my time is more scarce than ever and I feel like I can’t afford for things to go wrong, things are still going to go wrong. And it’s become really important to give myself a compassionate, generous, borderline delusional interpretation of such events.
I call it “ugly progress.” It’s the progress that doesn’t seem at all like progress. It might even be a direct setback.
It’s when you go shopping and don’t find what you’re looking for.
Or when you spend an hour on hold with customer service and still haven’t resolved the issue you thought would take five minutes to clear up.
Or when you realize you have to scrap the direction a project is going in and try a different one, even though you’ve already invested ten hours into it.
Or you realize that you’ve spent a decade married to someone you no longer want to be married to, or working in a field that isn’t the one you want to continue with.
At least with my mic issue, I essentially gave myself a rehearsal for the video I was recording. And maybe I can figure out what went wrong with my mic so that it never happens again.
But some ugly progress is even uglier. There is no “at least I learned something.” There’s no “but at least I made a friend/had a new experience/went down a street I’ve never gone down before/confirmed that I still don’t like horseradish.”
Nope, sometimes there is nothing to redeem the situation.
And yet I will still call it progress. Because on some cosmic level, apparently this miserable thing that happened had to be part of the process. So moving through it has to be getting me closer to my goal, as long as I don’t give up in the meantime.
You can see what I mean by “borderline delusional.” There might not be any evidence that success is part of my destiny or that this stupid thing that happened was necessary. But believing this story helps me to keep going, and I all need to do is to keep going.
That, in itself, is another layer of story: the belief that I can be successful if I keep going. If I didn’t believe that, the setbacks would be too painful, and I’d quit. I don’t want to quit, so I hang onto the belief.
You could frame it as faith: I can’t prove that my believe is right, but no one can prove it’s wrong, either. So I’ll keep it until it stops working for me.
I do believe in God, but I also believe that the universe is too complex for me to parse. Thus, my trusty mic suddenly quitting is not a sign from the heavens telling me I’m not cut out for YouTube. It’s just part of the ugly progress.
I’ve been time-tracking my work since 2021, and you better believe the ugly progress gets tracked. It counts as part of the work. It’s nice if tracking those unexpected detours and obstacles of ugly progress can help me work around it next time or at least improve my time and scope estimates for next time, but that’s not always the case. What it shows me is that my time and effort is real, and that work does become part of me in a real, if intangible way. It helps me grow.
At least, I hope it does. Of course, that’s a rationalization, too. But it is another belief that helps me to accept the pain and frustration of ugly progress. Try it and see if it can do the same for you.
I use Sunsama to track my time and tasks to make hard work feel less like a slog. Try it for free! (That’s an affiliate link.)
I’d love to help you to find more satisfaction in your work. Book a call with me!