by Heather Baldwin - November, 2021

It would be so nice if progress in learning a new skill was linear, wouldn’t it? Imagine sitting down every day to practice the piano – and every day, walking away from that practice exactly one percent better. Unfortunately, that’s not the way learning works. 

Instead, mastering a skill works more like bamboo growth. For the first five years of the plant’s life, it looks like nothing is happening. You can water it, fertilize it, give it plenty of sunlight and still there is no visible progress. Then one day: Whoosh! It breaks through the ground and can grow ninety feet tall in five weeks. So what was it doing those first five years? Laying the extensive root system that would feed its spectacular growth.

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear likens progress in a skill to an ice cube sitting in a twenty-five degree room that is heated one degree at time. Nothing happens as the room moves from twenty-five degrees to twenty-six, then to twenty-seven, etc. It looks like the effort to warm the room is producing no effect – right up until it hits thirty-two degrees. Then suddenly the ice begins to melt. “A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has unlocked a huge change,” says Clear. “Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash major change.”

This happens so often in learning to play the piano. A student might labor for years at it, making very slow progress. Maybe concepts like note reading and rhythm are taking a long time to grasp. Or maybe their fingers don’t move smoothly and naturally over the keys, making songs feel choppy and awkward. But when they stick with it week after week, year after year, they eventually experience that “whoosh!” moment where they suddenly break through and shoot upward.

Every time I see this happen, it’s exciting. There’s a tipping point – and it is different for everyone – where the accumulation of all previous effort suddenly tilts a student onto a whole new level. For a long time, they appear to be making glacier-like progress. Then something catches. They start moving through repertoire and new concepts so quickly and masterfully, it is dizzying. Skills that were difficult for them are now effortless. There’s a palpable excitement for music about them that wasn’t there before. 

It’s important to see these moments for what they truly are: the culmination of the years spent laying a foundation. The only thing that happened “overnight” was that the steady accumulation of skill reached a critical mass. This, says Clear, is “the hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.”

When students are in a season of laying the root structure – or heating up that cold room by degrees – it’s common to experience frustration or worry that they won’t ever “get it.” Clear calls this the Valley of Disappointment because on a graph of effort and results, the outcome of all the early work on learning a skill lies far below what you'd expect. After much effort, you’ve heated the room from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees and nothing seems to be happening with that ice cube. Unfortunately, this is when a lot of people walk away – right before that thirty-two-degree inflection point. Right before the moment of breakthrough.

“We often expect progress to be linear. At the very least, we hope it will come quickly,” says Clear. “In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done.”

If you haven't experienced that breakthrough moment yet, it simply means the root system is still being laid. Mastery is a lagging indicator of effort. Often, it lags by many years.