Why Progress Feels Slow When You're Doing the Work
In 1975, Sylvester Stallone had $106 in his bank account and a 130-pound bull mastiff he could no longer afford to feed. He sold the dog, Butkus, outside a liquor store for $40. A few weeks later he wrote the Rocky script in three and a half days, turned down $360,000 for it because the studio wouldn’t let him star in the film, and eventually sold it for $25,000 on his terms. The moment he had money, he tracked down Butkus and paid $15,000 to get him back. Rocky became the highest-grossing film of 1976 and won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
I think about that story a lot, both on my long bike rides and as I build my business. Nothing about progress has ever felt linear. There is no single ride where fitness arrives, and no single quarter where momentum becomes obvious. The gains come quietly across weeks of unglamorous repetition, until one day a climb that used to break you simply doesn’t, or a problem that used to stop you becomes something you handle without thinking. The work accumulates long before the results do.
Staying through that gap is where most people struggle. When feedback is slow and nothing seems to be working, the pressure to change course becomes hard to ignore. A new approach, a fresh strategy, a reduction in effort. Each feels justified in the moment. But every course correction undoes progress that was already accumulating. Most approaches fail not because they are wrong, but because they are abandoned too soon.
Measuring yourself against someone further ahead makes this harder. You see their position, their output, their momentum. You rarely see the years, the nights, the quietly difficult stretches they went through to get there, doing the same things you are doing now.
Those periods deserve a closer look. Soreness is the body rebuilding. Struggle is a skill forming. The discomfort that arrives when progress feels absent is frequently the clearest sign that it isn’t. Pain is progress. That is how adaptation works. Growth lives in the resistance, and the people who come out the other side are usually the ones who stopped treating discomfort as a reason to stop.
Practically, that means three things: show up on the days it doesn’t feel worth it, recover well enough to keep showing up, and track your effort rather than your outcomes. Results follow effort. They just don’t arrive at the same time.
When progress feels slow, are you measuring the right thing?
