A Slow Fire

Gradual change is hard to notice.

We adapt quickly to a smell, to noise, to rising expenses, to a deteriorating relationship and to daily fatigue. Each separate step is too small to raise alarm. Only the distance covered becomes significant.

The same happens with improvement. One training session after another changes almost nothing. Then an old action is suddenly easy. A person does not notice their own progress and decides they were always able to do it that way.

So slow processes need external markers:

• a record of expenses;
• measurements;
• photographs;
• a training log;
• a regular conversation;
• a comparison with the starting state;
• limits set in advance.

Not everything should be measured. A number easily displaces the goal. You can improve the number of pages read and understand books ever more poorly.

A good metric helps you notice the direction before the change becomes irreversible.

Thresholds are particularly useful:

If expenses go above this sum, I review the budget.

If the symptom lasts this long, I see a doctor.

If the workload has been growing for three months, I discuss my duties.

If an action produces no result by the set date, I change the method.

Water heats up gradually under more than just frogs. Usually under people too. The difference is that a person can install a thermometer.

Subscriptions are the cleanest example. Each one on its own costs less than lunch, so none of them requires a decision. Two years later there are eleven of them, four have never been used, and the annual total equals a holiday. From inside the process this is invisible: nothing changed in any single month. It shows only when compared with the point where it all started. The same goes for workload: each individual request to stay late looks reasonable, and only by spring does it emerge that the evenings ran out back in the autumn.

That is why thresholds are set in advance and in numbers. The formula “if it gets really bad, I will do something” does not work: “really bad” moves along with the person and always turns out to be slightly beyond wherever they are standing now.