Why Progress Feels Slow: Crossing the Plateau of Latent Potential

Have you ever worked hard on something — writing a book, building a business, learning a new skill—and felt like nothing was happening?
The frustrating truth is that meaningful progress often happens invisibly before it suddenly becomes obvious.

There are times when we all get stuck on the plateau of latent potential.

Earlier this month, I almost gave up on my self-publishing journey. Not in a dramatic, tear-it-all-down sort of way. But in the quieter, more dangerous way—where I started to think:

Perhaps this isn’t going anywhere.

I allowed myself a day to sit with that. To acknowledge how uncomfortable that feeling is—being in motion, but not seeing my desired results. Maybe it was time to quit. To quietly fold my tent and slip quietly into the night.

Fortunately, I didn’t make any permanent decisions. Because a few days later, things began to shift. Not dramatically. Not in a way that would make for a flashy success story. But enough to remind me that something had been building all along.

It would be easy to frame that as a turning point. A breakthrough. But that’s not what it was. What it really did was force me to look at the timeline properly. My first self-published book is just over a year old.

One year. That’s it.

To get that into perspective, I heard something recently that stopped me in my tracks. A marketing coach said:

“The launch window for a book isn’t a day, or a week, or even a month. It’s two years.”

Two years.

Not a moment. A window.

Which means that at one year in, I’m not behind. I’m early.

A dear friend reminded me that I had just cracked the Plateau of Latent Potential and now results would escalate. Crossing the plateau of latent potential is critical to building good habits and achieving goals because this is where the true transformation happens. It’s also key to manage our expectations. Our culture has raised us on the concept of ‘overnight success’.

It took about 10 years’ time for Shopify to be an overnight success. – Tobias Lutke

We’ve been conditioned to think of results as linear. Put in the effort and the results appear. But the reality is they tend to be exponential. A slow burn for a period of time and then a sudden burst of results. As James Clear highlights in his book Atomic Habits, the plateau of latent potential is the stage where you continue to put in effort, but you don’t see immediate results. Clear calls this delta between expected results and actual results the Valley of Disappointment. It can be discouraging, and many people give up at this stage.

However, those who persist and continue to put in the work will eventually see the results they desire.

The plateau of latent potential is the stage where habits become ingrained and automatic. It is where the small changes you make in your daily routine begin to add up and compound over time. Clear uses the example of an ice cube to illustrate this concept. If you have an ice cube sitting at room temperature, it won’t melt immediately when you raise the temperature slightly. However, if you continue to raise the temperature, the ice cube will eventually melt. The same is true of building good habits, a business, and achieving fitness goals. And it’s how books get written and readerships built.

A year into publishing, it was very easy to believe I should be seeing more. More readers. More sales. More momentum. But if the real timeline is closer to two years—or more—then what felt like stagnation might simply be the early stages of accumulation.

The work is happening. It’s just not visible yet. The challenge, of course, is that this phase is uncomfortable. There’s a constant, quiet question running in the background:

When is this going to work?

And the longer that question goes unanswered, the heavier it becomes.

So I’ve had to find a way to keep going without letting that question run the show. For me, that has meant learning to hold the outcome lightly. Not to ignore it. Not to pretend it doesn’t matter. But to stop gripping it so tightly that every day feels like a verdict.

Instead of asking: When am I going to arrive?

I try to ask: How can I enjoy the journey today?

• How can I write a better scene?
• How can I make this process a little smoother?
• How can I find something—anything—to enjoy in the work itself?

Because if the only satisfaction comes from the outcome, the plateau becomes unbearable.

But if there’s something in the process itself—curiosity, improvement, even a small sense of satisfaction—then the work becomes sustainable.

Progress rarely feels dramatic while it’s happening. It feels repetitive. Uneventful. Occasionally discouraging. But persistence has a way of compounding quietly—until one day what looked like slow progress reveals itself as transformation. If you’re in that phase right now, where it feels like nothing is happening:

You may not be stuck.

You may simply be early.

Don’t quit too soon!

Progress rarely feels dramatic while it’s happening. But persistence quietly compounds — until one day what looked like slow progress reveals itself as transformation.