February 11, 2026
Thought of the Day: Crooked progress is still progress.
Crooked progress does not look impressive.
Crooked progress does not make for neat timelines or satisfying before and after stories. It does not give you a clean graph that moves steadily up and to the right. It feels uneven. It feels repetitive. Sometimes it feels like you are circling the same mountain instead of climbing it.
And yet crooked progress is still progress.
We are conditioned to expect straight lines. Improvement should be obvious. Growth should be measurable. Change should feel dramatic. If it does not feel dramatic, we assume it is not happening.
But most of life does not work that way.
Think about the last year of your life. Not the highlight reel. Not the milestones. The quiet middle. The ordinary Tuesdays. The conversations that did not explode like they used to. The reactions you managed to soften. The moments where you paused instead of pushing.
That is crooked progress.
It is subtle. It does not announce itself. It shows up in small adjustments. You recover a little faster. You notice your own tone before it sharpens. You choose patience once where you would have chosen pride before.
No one claps for that.
But it counts.
There have been seasons where I thought nothing was changing. Same struggles. Same frustrations. Same internal loops. Then one day I would catch myself responding differently. Not perfectly. Just differently.
A little less defensive.
A little more curious.
A little slower to react.
It did not feel like growth. It felt like barely holding the line. But when I zoomed out, I could see that something had shifted.
Crooked progress requires perspective.
When you zoom in too close, all you see are stumbles. When you zoom out, you see movement.
That perspective shift is not automatic. It takes attention. It takes the willingness to slow down long enough to notice what is happening beneath the surface. In Stop and Listen: What the Rain Can Teach You About Spring, I wrote about how growth often happens underground while we are busy complaining about the weather. Rain does not feel productive. It feels inconvenient. But it is doing something that matters.
So is your uneven progress.
You might still lose your temper sometimes.
You might still procrastinate.
You might still doubt yourself.
But maybe you apologize faster.
Maybe you start sooner.
Maybe you spiral for an hour instead of a week.
That is movement.
We tend to discount small improvements because they do not satisfy our need for transformation. We want breakthroughs. We want clarity. We want the moment where everything clicks into place.
Most of the time, what we get instead is repetition.
Show up.
Try again.
Adjust slightly.
Repeat.
There is a humility in that rhythm. It forces you to accept that growth is not a performance. It is a practice. And practice is rarely glamorous.
Crooked progress also asks for patience with yourself.
You are not a machine. You are not a productivity system. You are a person shaped by habit, history, emotion, and circumstance. Changing any of that takes time. It takes friction. It takes failure.
And sometimes it takes revisiting the same lesson more than once.
There are mistakes I have made more than once. Patterns I thought I had outgrown that resurfaced under pressure. Old habits that reappeared when I was tired. Those habits can feel harmless while they are light, and then one day you realize they have weight. That idea has stuck with me since I wrote Chains of habit are too light to be felt.
For a long time, I interpreted that as regression. I thought, I should be past this by now.
But maybe being past it does not mean it never shows up again. Maybe it means you handle it better when it does.
That is crooked progress.
The line bends. It doubles back. It pauses. It resumes.
You might feel like you are stuck because you are not sprinting. But steady walking, even with a limp, still covers ground.
Consistency does not mean perfection. It means continuation.
It means you keep practicing the version of yourself you are trying to become, even when the results are not obvious. It means you tolerate the awkward middle where you are not who you were, but you are not fully who you want to be either.
The middle is messy.
But the middle is where most of life is lived.
If you are in a season that feels uneven, resist the urge to declare it a failure. Look closer. Where have you softened? Where have you tightened up? Where have you made a slightly better choice than you would have six months ago?
Those are markers.
They may not impress anyone else. They may not even impress you. But they are real.
Crooked progress builds something durable because it is honest. It is not built on hype or adrenaline. It is built on repetition. On quiet effort. On getting up again without announcing it to the world.
You do not need a dramatic overhaul to move forward. You need awareness. You need patience. You need the willingness to keep going even when the line bends.
Especially when it bends.
Because straight lines are rare.
But movement, however uneven, is enough.
Leave a Reply