Progress Over Perfection (Atomic Essay Day 19)
I’m learning how to do a freestanding handstand. In order to build towards that I first needed to learn how to do a handstand - something that took me 6 months to do. The next step - where I’m currently at is to be able to walk on my hands while taking the support of the wall. Today in trying to do that, my coach went -
“It's like learning how to walk. First you take the support of the walls, then once you’ve built the strength you can learn how to walk on your own.”
I had a mini flashback in my head of all the ‘failed’ handstand attempts - all those thousands of kicks over many months. Had it not been for my coach, I would have probably given up a long time ago - for one, I didn’t have the knowledge but more importantly, I didn’t know how to measure my own progress. I would not have been able to distinguish between my attempt on Day 1 vs Day 16 without my coach. Because we were carefully monitoring that progress, I could stay motivated to keep trying and the outcome is way sweeter.
We tend to give up on a lot of difficult things because we’re unable to see progress. Like in my case with the handstand - sometimes we don’t know how to measure progress. And sometimes we’re so caught up chasing the perfect end goal that we don’t think about what progress even looks like. Rome wasn’t built in a day - a mental tattoo for all of us.