Are we there yet?

Why time lies about progress

In modern times, the measurement of time is used to ensure order and understanding of the world around us. We ask how long someone has worked in a certain job so as to understand if they’re capable of doing another, just as we ask how long two people have been together so as to understand how strong their partnership is. We understand the world around us, through time. We create expectations of where and what people should be based purely on how long they have been exposed to these things.

The issue is time can be an extremely unreliable narrator when it is used in ways that are out of the norm. Over the past 11 months, I have been intensively learning French. If I speak to someone in French and they inquire how long I’ve been learning for, and I reply less than a year, they will be quite shocked at my progress - but they have no idea that I have consumed more than 100 hours of private lessons and dedicated a significant portion of that year to this one skill.

The opposite of this scenario is of course true, I know many people who have lived in a foreign country for 10 years and can barely introduce themselves in the native tongue - but the true measurement of their time allocated to this task is likely less than 2 weeks of my intense French exposure, so there should be no room for surprise.

I had a similar experience with tennis, having decided last year that I want to take it more seriously and allocate the time to get better. I spent hours practicing, took lessons, got to a certain level of skill that I could effectively self-critique and I (unsurprisingly) improved a lot. I play in a local competition here and people regularly tell me they’ve been playing for many years longer but have accepted their ‘forever plateau’. I understand the comfort that comes with just showing up and doing something you love, but you never need to accept a capped ceiling unless you want it - there is always room for improvement if you dedicate focussed time to do so.

One delightful effect these experiences have had on me is that my understanding of how long things take has changed. The true measurement to skill acquisition is simply how many focussed hours you spend on a certain task, ideally noting down your shortfalls and dedicating time to practicing them. For most of the latin languages, we have the science to support that it roughly takes 100 hours to get into basic conversations, more than 250 hours to start having meaningful conversation and somewhere around 500 hours to become a solid intermediate.

These same numbers exist for every individual with every skill, they will vary drastically based on your individual history and they’re not always exactly measurable, but if you were theoretically a character in a video game - you’d have every skill measured out by a progress bar and they would have a ‘time required to achieve’ certain levels. I had a head start with French because I speak English natively and reasonable Portuguese, maybe you have a head start at swimming because you used to surf.

And here’s the thing about time - it isn’t universal, gravity slows time. We know that a clock on the ground floor of a building runs slower than one on the top floor because it’s closer to Earth’s mass. Something I learnt while writing this is that GPS satellites have to account for this and their atomic clocks tick faster than ground-based ones by about 38 microseconds per day. Without correcting for this, GPS would drift by roughly 10km daily. Even physics reaffirms that time is an unreliable narrator for earthly deeds.

Gravity bends time

I think of time as a well of opportunity that I get to drink out of each day. Each and every day I am so fortunate to be able to allocate this magical substance into the things and the people that I love, knowing that every drop fills my cup closer to its brim.

Perhaps if we treated all time as a currency that we are in control of, we would invest it better and appreciate the accumulative benefits of incremental change. In the internet age we are so programmed to find dopamine in 15 second Tiktoks that the thought of chipping away at hard tasks is difficult to digest.

It reminds me of a great 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 blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

We do not appreciate that all our failures are us hammering away at the stone, priming us for future success. This metaphor also doesn’t account for most success not being so viscerally measurable, learning a language is a lifetime commitment with no obvious measurable ending, just as staying healthy or keeping fit. We equate so much of our time as being wasted, but even wasted time serves as a reminder for us to be productive - by means of which the time was no longer wasted.

Life, if lived well, is long enough.

- Jords