process determines progress
Your commitment to the process determines your progress.
Anyone who has mastered a craft will tell you, improvement is very rarely linear. We often go long periods of time where we seemingly make no progress. Author James Clear calls this the “Plateau of Latent Potential”.
Eventually, if you commit the process long enough, you’ll break through this plateau and reach a new threshold of ability. It will feel as if everything clicked overnight, but in reality your efforts accumulated until you reached the tipping point.
Most of us never make it this far, because we’re stuck in The Valley of Disappointment.
American photographer, journalist, and social reformer is known for the quote, “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last bow that did it — but all that had gone before.”
It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now.
Ultimately, your commitment to the process matters most.