Success Is Nonlinear. So Is Progress.
originally published in August, 2019
Raise your hand if you’ve ever worked diligently at a project only to see little to no results—or worse, to see it crash and burn into a pile of smoking ash.
Oh, you too?
Yeah, I’ve been feeling this way a little recently. I’ve started to make a real effort to create regularly, to carve out precious time from my packed schedule of teaching, counseling, momming, wifing, and just surviving for creative pursuits—for posting and blogging and journaling and promoting. And so far, I have nothing to show for it. I can remind myself that it hasn’t been long, that the fact that I’m making that time at all is a victory in itself, and so on, but it doesn’t really change how I feel. My inner critic is saying, “you’re not good enough,” “you’re working on the wrong thing,” “you’re never going to find success.” And that critic is very, very convincing.
The same kind of litany attacks regarding other endeavors too: “you’re failing as a mother,” “you’ll never get fit again (you lazy slob),” “you’re not doing enough at work,” etc. The next words are always, “you should just give up.”
But what I’m missing at those moments is perspective.
Most of us tend to think the world should operate in a linear, “if A then B and then C” kind of way. We expect our efforts to produce immediate, tangible results, confirmation that we chose and acted well. Sure, we’ve learned, mature adults that we are, that big goals require patience and that the ability to delay gratification is a virtue. But we still want to see an upward trend in the meantime. And if we don’t, it gets ugly.
Image credit: This Is A Book, by Demetri Martin
Chances are you’ve probably seen something like this drawing before. Originally published by a comedian, it’s a funny diagram to remind us that success is not linear. And we may chuckle to ourselves and think, “Aw, that poor guy. But he got there eventually!” And then we carry on, secretly, subconsciously believing that this kind of tangled path is the fate of some, but that it won’t be our fate. No, no, we think. We might have a few bumps in our road—who doesn’t—but surely those kinds of crazy curly-cues are only for those other kinds of people, not people like us. And then we wait for the next joke.
But this is not a laughing matter, at least not when you’re in one of those down slopes. When you’re the one staring into the yawning abyss of failure and disgrace, of lost hopes and crushed dreams, it’s anything but funny. Because, for all you know, your trajectory may keep going down, and down, and down until you’re living behind a dumpster or whatever your worst-case scenario fantasy is. At that moment, you can’t see when or if things might take a turn for the better—when that slope will shift from a negative one to a positive.
These down times can be very, very discouraging—especially if you’ve been enjoying a significant period of upward progress. Maybe your project/book/presentation proposal was rejected, or you haven’t gotten an interview after dozens (or even hundreds) of job applications, or you were fired, or no one is buying what you’re selling. If you’re still in school, maybe you bombed an important test or paper, or didn’t get a part in the play, or got cut from the soccer team, or froze in front of the whole school during a presentation. It cuts the deepest when you’ve worked really hard on whatever it was, putting in hours and hours, sacrificing your social life, other responsibilities, or sleep. It feels like all that work was for nothing, like you shouldn’t even have tried, like the last days or weeks or months or years of effort and planning were a complete and total waste.
But they weren’t. No matter how dismal your failure, how complete the crash, no effort is ever wasted. Because the results that matter are internal, not external.
What matters is the way we are molding our hearts, minds, and habits to form us more into the people we want to be, the people God created us to be.
Success is not linear. Neither is progress. It also can’t be measured by external signs and signals. And most of us are really terrible judges of our own progress.
Now, a failure may mean that we need to adjust something about our approach, or that we’re directing our efforts at the wrong endeavor, or that we made a crappy choice or two (or twenty) somewhere along the way. And we need to look hard at these things and make that adjustment.
But we do not need to beat ourselves up, or throw up our hands, or call our dreams dirty names and toss them in a deep closet and lock the door. Rather, we need to ask ourselves, what can I learn from this? What have I already learned along the way? How have I grown as a result of my efforts, regardless of the outcome?
I’ve had to do this repeatedly with my “failed” business endeavor as an independent college applications advisor. I was told it was a highly lucrative career, that there was an opening in the market locally, that I would be a great fit. I dedicated countless hours and many thousands of dollars to learning the business and honing my skills. I had a few clients, but mostly? Crickets. Years down the road, it was soooooo easy to feel embarrassed and discouraged, to wonder what’s wrong with me that I couldn’t make this work. And what a waste of time and money! But . . . Now, a few more years down the road, I can how very much I learned through that process of starting a business that is helping me start one now as a writer and editor. Now, I can see that maybe, just maybe, it’s actually good that I didn’t succeed as a college applications advisor because then I wouldn’t have had the time or drive to lean into my calling as a writer.
My ego still stings when I think about it, but mostly I’m able to look back with gratitude and appreciate both how hard I worked and the fact that it didn’t work out.
I’ve finally learned, in the face of disappointment or apparent failure, to ask this essential question: Could it be that God is saying “no” in this particular instance, not because I don’t deserve it or am not capable of it, but because He wants to give me something even better?
It may take months or years before you know the answer. But that’s not the point. The point is to hold space for the possibility.
It is possible that this “failure” is actually a success, that this loss is a ultimately a net gain. It is possible that what I’ve learned and what I’m still learning is more valuable than the goal that’s eluded my grasp. It is possible that I have to watch this good thing pass me by because something great awaits?
In possibility lies hope. And in hope we can find strength.
When we finally get enough distance from those times that we can look back with the glorious perspective of hindsight, we usually see that those troughs were the richest times of growth in our lives, the times when God was doing the most work in our hearts. And while we might wish them away at the time, in retrospect we can see that we’d never have gotten where we are without going through those struggles. We start to be able to look back at a much bigger picture and see the ways that the things we thought were mistakes or failures or even tragedies were also steps down a path to even greater gifts.
But I won’t say they were steps toward success, because part of what I’m starting to see is that success, at least as we usually define it, is not the goal. Success does not bring lasting happiness or fulfillment. And it is not what God promises or even wants for us—at least not in the generally accepted sense of the term. It’s not that success is necessarily bad, but it’s like most worldly pleasures—a very mixed bag. No, what God wants for us is so. much. more. than success.
So the next time a door slams in your face, or you totally blow a presentation, or something turns out to be totally different than you thought it would be, take a moment and ask yourself, “What if God has something greater planned for me, for my life?” What if this “no” is really a “yes” to something even better?
