The Power of Plateaus and How to Become the Best at your Field

Written by Enrique Iturriaga on

December 23, 2022

🤦‍♂️ The power of plateaus and understanding the power of potential energy.

Plateau: To reach a state of little or no change after a time of activity or progress.

The natural course of skill acquisition, learning, and accomplishing pretty much anything worth achieving, is challenging by definition. Otherwise, every human would achieve everything that’s considered hard, and difficult skills wouldn’t be scarce.

The course of skill acquisition usually goes as follows:

1. You are a beginner, and it’s relatively easy to improve at a high rate with an average amount of effort.
2. You hit the first plateau, where most people quit.
3. You keep investing in your improvement even though you see no noticeable improvement. (Potential energy starts adding up)
4. You hit a point where all that Potential energy gets released, and your skill level does a quantum leap.
5. Steps 2, 3, and 4 happen again, and again the percentage of people left diminishes over time. The people left are the people we call the 1%ers.

If we dissect this pattern, we understand that plateaus are not only significant. Plateaus are probably the most crucial part of the learning process. It’s just that our ego doesn’t like it. We feel stuck, and we are so used to receiving positive reinforcement that it’s demoralizing when we don’t get a pat on the back after investing time and effort on anything.

We must look at the learning process differently and understand that plateaus are just periods where we collect potential energy ⚡️ (without visible results) and get ready for a future breakthrough.

If we do this, we can not only survive plateaus, but we can use them as a marker and foreshadower of our coming leap.

None of this is trying to give you a prescriptive way of “hacking” the learning process. The truth is that if you don’t really want to become truly great at something, you won’t. It doesn’t matter what tips or tricks you apply.

I genuinely believe that human beings ALWAYS get what they REALLY want in life. When humans don’t get what they want is because they didn’t really want it enough.

That is not to say that it’ll be equally easy for everyone.

The starting point is different for everyone. Still, the possibility of getting to the place you want to get is always present.

Plateaus are what Seth Godin calls “The Dip”. They are the main challenges you’ll face when you try to accomplish something. They make you feel inadequate, under-qualified, and insecure. They will test if you are really willing to push forward. They will test if you really want to get where you said you want to get👈.

Plateaus are the storm you need to go through to get to your final destination. And the only way to do it is to learn to “love the storm.”

And loving the storm means: choosing to find delight in the parts or the process that regular people avoid.