How I’ve been thinking about “progress” lately…
There’s a video from Casey Neistat called [Do what you can’t](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7dSXcfVqE). It is one of my all-time favorite short-style videos. I’ve said this before too, but Casey is one of the few human beings that I genuinely admire. Today, I was thinking a bit about the story of my life up to this point. And a constant factor has been doing what I should have been able to do. But I did it anyway. I’m not talking “against the odds”. I’m talking very close to impossible. And yeah, I know I’ve been privileged in a lot of ways considering my background, but even given where I started from, I shouldn’t have been here today. But I did it anyway. And that makes me happy when I think about it :)
Back to the topic of this blog: When I think about “making progress” in life, I think we humans often trap ourselves mentally and think that as long as we’re doing something, or striving towards something and getting closer to it, we’re making progress. I think we can be more visionary with our definition :) These days, I tend to think of “making progress” as doing anything it takes so that you’ll be able to do certain things in the future that you physically are not “able” to do today (could be mentally, physically, or anything really). So in a sense, what I’m saying is that if you’re already capable of doing something to some extent, you’re not really making progess by doing it more in my mind. And I mean that, even if you are becoming better at it, you’re not really making any “meaningful” progress. If becoming “better” at this thing is not going to unlock something for you that you literally “can not” do currently, what’s the use of this “progress” to begin with? Which brings me back to the idea that we should all strive to “do what we can’t”.